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.     

CALLING ALL ENSEMBLES

 

I’ve established here and elsewhere the way that a narrative’s centricity can be either concentrated upon one starring character or distributed across an ensemble of characters. And in this essay I showed how a particular narrative with a huge cast of characters, DC THE NEW FRONTIER, could center upon a more limited ensemble of characters who possessed stature superior to all of the others. I’m contemplating a more involved definition of stature with respect to centricity, one that might define stature as a sort of “motive force,” something that impels the narrative, but I haven’t concluded those meditations.

Because of my recent reading of the manga NISEKOI, which I’ll discuss separately, I’ve noted that it’s not impossible for a narrative, particularly a serial one, to possess two ensembles, a superordinate one and a subordinate one. The subordinate ensemble does not simply consist of all the supporting characters within the narrative. In DC THE NEW FRONTIER all the characters who lack centric status are simply support-characters. A story with a subordinate ensemble, however, has a collection of characters who function in the same way as the characters in a superordinate ensemble, except that the former simply lack the stature of one or more starring characters.

I’ve expended a fair amount of attention to the interlinked teleserials ANGEL and BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER. According to my lights, BUFFY is always focused on the titular character, and every else in the story exists to support her. However, her “inner circle” of allies, informally called “the Scooby Gang,” function to have strong interactions with Buffy and to generate plot-threads centered temporarily upon them. Originally the subordinate ensemble includes only Xander, Willow and Giles, while later seasons introduce a variety of other featured characters to the ensemble, including a former adversary, Spike. However, some of the Scooby Gang’s allies—Angel, Riley, Tara—never reach the same stature. Angel is transformed into a foe and then leaves the show to star in his own series, Riley only lasts one season as a temporary boyfriend for Buffy, and Tara is killed in order to give her lover Willow a new emotional arc.

Angel starts out his own series as the sole star, with just two characters, Cordelia (a transplant from the BUFFY show) and Doyle forming a subordinate ensemble. But within the first season Doyle is slain and Cordelia inherits his precognitive talent, which makes her character more consequential. In addition, another refugee from BUFFY, Wesley, joins the team. The stories shift to stress the importance of the team rather than just Angel, and from then on Angel and all of his form a superordinate ensemble. Though other characters join the team  the ANGEL series never generates a corresponding subordinate ensemble but only handfuls of disparate support-characters.

Some serials may generate huge subordinate ensembles in which none of the characters ever quite eclipse a single central figure, as I’ve observed in both DRAGONBALL and BLEACH. A number of serials in the romantic comedy genre center upon a male and female lead, such as both URUSEI YATSURA and RANMA 1/2. Both of these Takahashi serials generate populous casts who function as subordinate ensembles, and URUSEI in particular includes a number of stories in which the romantic duo of Lum and Ataru is sidelined by the activities of ensemble-characters like Mendou or Ryunosuke, though none of these characters ever assume greater stature thereby. NISEKOI follows this basic paradigm in that the serial’s main emphasis is a romantic couple, but the activities of the subordinate ensemble are more centered upon either enhancing or undermining the romance of the two main characters.

MYTHCOMICS: "A BAD CUT" (1987)

RANMA 1/2, Rumiko Takahashi's second long-running serial, marked a change in approach from her previous extended project, URUSEI YATSURA. The earlier serial focused on the adventures of two prickly paramours, Japanese boy-teen Ataru and alien girl Lum-- and although Takahashi often devoted considerable time to the series' support-cast, Lum and Ataru were front and center when the artist finally brought the series to a close.

However, a close reading of URUSEI's first stories suggests that Takahashi may not have originally intended Lum to be the co-star. (It's my recollection that the artist said as much at a San Diego Con many years ago, but I didn't write down her remarks.) My close reading suggests that Ataru and his normal girlfriend Shinobu might've have been Takahashi's original romantic team, with Lum registering as little more than an obnoxious intruder.

The first major arc of RANMA 1/2-- which I've chosen to title "A Bad Cut" after one of the story-titles-- seems designed to leave no room for any Lum-like character to oust the "normal girl."In URUSEI, Takahashi doesn't really devote much attention to Shinobu, but Akane Tendou, the female co-star of RANMA, gets her own personal psychology. She also has her own unique place within her family, consisting of her widowed father Soun and her two older sisters Kasumi and Nabiki. To be sure, Takahashi never, in the entire series, devotes much detail to the sisters' late mother. The mother's absence has no perceptible psychological effect on the older sisters, especially not Kasumi, who essentially takes on the role of the family's "mother" by handling all the cooking and cleaning of their home. Indeed, Kasumi never shows any sexual feelings for anyone, nor evinces any intention of leaving her faux-mother position in the family.

Akane, lacking a feminine role-model capable of helping her negotiate her interactions with boys of her own age, apparently emulates her father instead. In "Bad Cut," the reader knows little about Soun Tendou, except that he maintains the girls' home in some Japanese suburb by running a dojo (although no students are ever seen, and he's not even seen instructing Akane). Martial arts offer Akane a way to keep the male of the species at a distance, as is seen early in the arc, when she's seen literally fighting off boys at high school who think she'll date them if they defeat her.

So Akane becomes a Japanese Atlanta, using her athleticism to avoid contact with males. However, unlike the folkloric father of Atlanta, Soun does want Akane-- or at least one of his three daughters-- to marry in order to carry on the heritage of Soun's dojo. To accomplish this, Soun promises to marry one of his daughters to Ranma, the son of Soun's fellow martial artist Genma Saotome.

One day Genma and Ranma come to Japan to visit Soun-- but neither of the Saotomes is anything like what Soun remembers. It's eventually revealed that while the Saotomes traveled in China, brushing up on their martial arts disciplines, they foolishly trained in "the Ground of Accursed Springs." Over the years, many creatures, including human beings, have fallen into this or that spring and drowned-- and any spring that has drowned a living creature also has the magical power to "impress" the physical appearance of the drowned creature onto any living creature who falls into a given spring. The transformation is temporary, in that it can be reversed if the victim is doused in hot water. However, the reversal is also temporary, since cold water will return the victim to his or her cursed status. In the case of Ranma, he's cursed to transform into a girl (hence the title, which means something like "Ranma between two states"), while his father Genma does double-duty as a giant panda.

The shape-shifting antics of the Saotomes naturally provide lots of craziness for the relatively normal Akane to deal with. Neither she nor Ranma agree to their patents' idea of an arranged marriage, but Soun nevertheless invites the Saotomes to be his permanent house-guests. Thus the two teenagers are obliged to interact every day, as well as going to the same high school, and they frequently quarrel as a result, not least because they do have a tentative attraction to one another. Ranma is more often the source of the quarrels, for his upbringing as an itinerant martial artist have made him into a bantam rooster who views every confrontation as an excuse for a fight. Further, while Genma isn't particularly put out by his periodic transformations into a panda, Ranma's masculine ego is perpetually injured by his assumption of female physicality. His male mentality is never altered by his transformation, and one could hypothesize that his many years of training have atrophied his sexual instincts. Whereas URUSEI's male lead Ataru could think of nothing but chasing girls, Ranma is even less practiced than Akane at dealing with the opposite sex. Often he needles Akane about her looks, acting more like a twelve-year old than a boy of about seventeen, and yet he's immediately threatened if another male makes up to Akane. As for Akane, whenever any competition arises-- and Ranma, despite his lack of manners, attracts a lot of other girls-- she responds by violently beating up Ranma, who refuses to fight back out of a sense of chivalry.

I won't explore every incident in "A Bad Cut," which includes introducing two of Ranma's frequent foes and sexual competitors, Tatewaki Kuno and Ryoga Hibiki. It's during one of Ranma's wild fights with Ryoga that Akane's long hair gets sliced off by one of Ryoga's weapons.

Despite her masculine aggressiveness, this attack on one of her feminine attributes strikes Akane hard. Takahashi then uses flashbacks to show how as a child Akane formed a crush on a handsome local twenty-something physician, given the winsome name "Doctor Tofu." However, even as a kid Akane notices how besotted Tofu is with Kasumi, who, for her part, seems oblivious. The child-Akane lets her hair grow out in the vain hope of attracting Tofu when she's old enough, making him something of a father-imago for her.

In the intervening years, apparently Tofu never works up enough courage to disclose his feelings to Kasumi, and his character quickly disappears from the RANMA narrative, given that he served his purpose by providing Akane with an early crush-object. Clearly Takahashi found in Tofu a means to intimate the existence of Akane's normal feminine instincts, which then had to be directed toward a more appropriate boy her own age. The accidental cutting of her hair, brought about by the aggressive behavior of boys, allows Akane to "get over" her childhood crush, and although her relationship with Ranma remains fractious for the rest of the series, it's from this point on that the reader's been assured of the continuance of the "dueling lovebirds" theme for the rest of the series.

Significantly, about a year later Takahashi does get around to bringing a female character who strongly resembles Lum in being a powerful "alien" figure" the Chinese Amazon Shampoo. Though Ranma never makes love to any of the women who pursue him-- being, in his way, faithful to Akane despite her constant suspicions-- Shampoo, with her greater martial skills and her exotic sexiness, seems the greatest threat to the main romantic relationship. But Shampoo never has any of Lum's charming qualities, thus assuring that she's really no danger to the romance at all.

THE COMPLICATIONS OF COMEDY

At the conclusion of PERSONAS OF GRATIFICATION I said:

The great failing of Quiller-Couch's breakdown is that its arrangement suggests that the "man" in the position of "protagonist" must be the main concern of the story, whereas I've detailed many examples in which the imaginative center can be the protagonist's villainous/monstrous opponent, whether it's a specific human threat (Fu Manchu), a natural phenomenon (Jules Verne's "Center of the Earth"), an unusual society, or a separate manifestation of one's own, as with Edward Hyde. 

Quiller-Couch's arrangement, by its use of the opposed terms "protagonist" and "antagonist," also suggests opposition in every sense.  And yet, it's possible-- particularly in comedy-- for the conflict to be one that results in accomodation rather than confrontation.  In this essay I cited the sociopolitical work of Francis Fukuyama, with special attention to his distinction between two "thymotic" processes, "megalothymia" and "isothymia:"

"Megalothymia can be manifest both in the tyrant who invades and and enslaves a neighboring people so that they will recognize his authority, as well as in the concert pianist who wants to be recognized as the foremost interpreter of Beethoven. Its opposite is isothymia, the desire to be recognized as the equal of other people. Megalothymia and isothymia together constitute the two manifstations of the desire for recognition around which the historical transition to modernity can be understood." (The End of History and the Last Man, p. 182).

I summed up my application of Fukuyama to literary studies thusly:

The phenomenon of sthenolagnia, of "strength-worship" in both real and literary worlds, could be said to abide in both of Fukuyama's categories. In "megalothymia" one worships a superior force which extends its power vertically downward. In "isothymia" one worships a commonality of interlinked and interdependent forces.

I'll admit that in most of my recent writings on the "persona-pairs" of "hero/villain" and "monster/demihero," I have tended to focus upon "megalothymic" conflicts, because so much genre fiction depends on such conflict.  I would argue that of Northrop Frye's four mythoi, adventure, drama, and irony are particularly dependent on this form of conflict.

Comedy, however, complicates the matter.  I should perhaps suspect some such permutation, though, given that I wrote in GRAVITY'S CROSSBOW PART 4 that the comedy-mythos was characterized by the least degree of audience-conviction in the fates of the characters:

This arbitrariness, this freedom from real consequence, is the reason I consider the comedy-mythos to be the one in which the audience holds the least degree of conviction—though such levity is precisely comedy’s appeal.

This is not to say that there aren't a lot of comedy-works that hinge on violent, megalothymotic conflict.  I'd hardly argue that after having frequently used the example of Rumiko Takahashi's RANMA 1/2 as a example of a "combative comedy."

However, it should be noted that the prime focus of the series-narrative-- one of the factors that trumps the adventure-elements of the stories-- is the romantic relationship of star Ranma Saotome and support-character Akane Tendou. Not every story in the series is about their rocky romance, but it sets the tone for the series; one that I call (in imitation of Theodor Gaster) the *jubilative.*

Ranma intrudes on the essentially placid home life of the Tendous and creates comic chaos.  To be sure, he isn't responsible for all of the chaos: before he arrives Akane has been having regular duels with Tatewaki Kuno in her attempts to fend off Kuno's ardor.  But once Ranma does arrive, the household is constantly invaded by people with grudges against Ranma.  Although Ranma certainly functions as a comic hero in the eyes of the audience, one might forgive Akane for regarding him as something of a "monster."

In many other comedies, however, the "monster" is neither heroic nor physically monstrous.

As this still from Rene Clair's 1942 film I MARRIED A WITCH suggests, Jennifer, the comely witch played by Veronica Lake, casts a forbidding shadow as she makes up to Fredric March's character Wallace.  She starts out the film intending to cause Wallace nothing but trouble, but accidentally drinks a potion that causes her to fall in love with him.  Though she is still in my reckoning the "focal presence" of the story, she becomes Wallace's ally against both her hostile witch-father and Wallace's shrewish fiancee.  Of my four "persona-types," Jennifer the Witch is still closest to that of the "monster," but plainly a benign one, like some of those discussed at the end of this essay.

As noted in ENSEMBLES ASSEMBLE a story may have more than one focal presence, as seen in the 1937 comedy TOPPER, based like WITCH on a Thorne Smith novel.

In this film there's no literal "antagonist," comparable to Jennifer's witch-father, against which the merrymaking ghosts George and Marion Kirby strive: theirs might be called a "man vs. society" struggle in that they endeavor to free up their henpecked, mousey buddy Cosmo Topper by encouraging him to act out and to remind his wife of his needs.

In both WITCH and TOPPER, supernatural beings bring conflict into the lives of drab humans, but it's clearly conflict that the humans need to break out of their respective ruts.  One might consider WITCH to still have some *megalothymic* elements given that Jennifer must at least outmaneuver her nasty daddy.  However, the Kirbys supply an entirely *isothymic* form of conflict.  Topper's narrative position approximates that of Jonathan Harker in DRACULA, but where "demihero" Harker is oppressed by the vampire's power, Topper's *thymos*, his power to be recognized as a willing subject, is enchanced by the ghosts' machinations.

Note that I'm not stating that no such *isothymic* arrangements pertain in drama, adventure, or irony.  But since all three mythoi are stronger in terms of the element of reader-conviction, one may speculate that *isothymic* scenarios simply don't appear as often.  It may that comedy can best deal with the idea of an anomaly that exists just to improve the life of a viewpoint character.

ADVENTURE-COMEDY VS. COMEDY-ADVENTURE PT. 2

In the last installment of this series I wrote of the comedy-adventure INFERIOR FIVE:

The plots of INFERIOR FIVE, too, are clearly meant to stress incongruity over agonic action. I noted above that the heroes sometimes do win battles, but generally it's out of sheer dumb luck rather than through skill.

I don't mean by that to suggest that all comic superheroes-- or even all comic heroes generally-- must be inept at winning battles. Though it's almost a given that in the adventure-mythos the hero's fighting-skills are better than average, superior fighting-ability can be seen in the protagonists of many dramas (ranging from RICHARD III to STAR TREK), ironies (WATCHMEN, possibly Hammett's "Continental Op" stories), and comedies such as POPEYE and POWERHOUSE PEPPER.

This time, however, I want to compare a comedy-adventure and an adventure-comedy that possess many similar elements (including a hero of amazing abilities), and yet still manage to come down on opposite sides of the divide.

Of the two, my selection for comedy-adventure will be the better known: Rumiko Takahashi's RANMA 1/2.

In BUFFY THE MYTHOS SLAYER I defined RANMA as a comedy thusly:

A better example of the superhero put forth as pure comedy might be Rumiko Takahashi’s RANMA ½ (1987-1996). Though the adventures of Ranma Saotome vary between high adventure and low sitcom goofiness, the constant focus of the series is the how Ranma and his reluctant betrothal Akane “discover” the depths of their feelings for one another and become reconciled to them. These characters are no more married at the conclusion of the series than Buffy is, but the final story does at least feature an attempt to get them married, even if it descends into comic chaos.

I noted in the next paragraph Ranma's superhero-like qualities: that he can punch through stone walls and defeat numerous adversaries with super-powers. He does this not through standard superhero powers but through an almost magical system of martial arts. Despite these extraordinary abilities, Ranma's normative activities are those of typical Japanese high-schoolers: sports, attending classes, et al. He and his father (seen in the illustration as a panda bear) permanently live with the Tendou family, and by agreement of the Tendous' father and Ranma's old man, Ranma and Akane are betrothed. Neither teenager accepts this declaration, though naturally both of them do actually like each other but won't admit it, etc. Akane, in fact, is very nearly the only character ever seen regularly beating Ranma up. This stems not from her equal possession of martial skills-- quite the opposite, in fact-- but because Ranma won't fight back against her. This ethic usually extends to all members of the feminine gender but on occasion Ranma makes exceptions when faced with truly skilled female opponents.



Ranma sometimes has extended fantasy-battles with supernatural creatures, like the winged bull-man seen here. Nevertheless, though Ranma always wins these altercations when it comes down to a test of strength and skill, the dominant theme of RANMA 1/2 is not the invigorative effect of the *agon* but the jubilative appeal of the incongruous. Most of the cast-members, like Ranma's part-time panda-bear father, undergo bizarre transformations of one kind or another. Takahashi often uses Ranma's fighting-skill as a means of ending the incongruity and returning to normality, but often Ranma is flummoxed or made foolish in some way even when he triumphs.

A very different aesthtic pervades Nobuhiro Watsuki's RUROUNI KENSHIN (1994-1999), however, even though many identical comedic elements appear throughout the series.





Watsuki presents the reader with a Mejii-era martial artist, Kenshin Himura, who is one of the great masters of the sword. His past is a great deal more haunted than Ranma's, in that Kenshin's duties to his former masters of the old Shogunate included using his sword for assassination. Dispirited by killing, he wanders into a small town and is taken in by Kaoru, a young female kendo artist. As with the Ranma-Akane relationship, Kaoru is nowhere near Kenshin's skill-level. Nevertheless, any time he pisses her off, she clobbers him soundly. It's not always clear whether Kenshin lets it happen because he won't fight women or because her audacity always takes him by surprise.



The series does have its share of comic misadventures, and like RANMA accumulates a large support-cast of characters, many of whom possess skills comparable to Kenshin's. However, humor is generally introduced to break the tension of the serious battles to come, even as RANMA uses adventure-tropes to briefly put its comic characters into what seems like serious situations before the story returns to the usual hijinks.

Moreover, Kenshin's battles are part of a larger plotline that develops over time, as to what forces will rule Japan during the Mejii era. The focus on large-scale conflict is the indubitable obverse of Takahashi's focus on RANMA, where the small-scale world of home and neighborhood take precedence over the world at large.

Both serials keep elements of adventure and comedy in play on a regular basis. But in each the respective authors clearly signal to their audiences that one mythos dominates all other potential rivals.