![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Mitsukazu Mihara, Doll, vols. 1-2: Dolls are machines that look just like humans and are programmed to be perfect servants, of whatever kind required. Illegal modifications can give them blood and guts, for greater verisimilitude. The stories are therefore mostly about the horrible things that people do to dolls, which are horrible because they feel like they’re being done to people, and/or because focusing on the dolls leads people to ignore the other actual people around them. And of course the question of consciousness is foregrounded: what does it mean to be a “person” worthy of moral consideration? Even if dolls aren’t people, isn’t it inherently wrong for the doer of horrible deeds to do those things to entities with the outward forms of humans? Or is it only fantasy, like the manga itself? Unfortunately, I didn’t feel that the manga did anything but raise those questions—it felt like it wanted to do more than titillate, but I wasn’t seeing anything more.
Kaori Yuki, The Cain Saga, vols. 1-4 (in 5 volumes, which is a signal about what’s inside): Earl Cain is a Victorian aristocrat, for values of Victorian aristocrat that are extremely wacky. His birth is shrouded in secret shame; his father hates him and whips him cruelly; his butler Riff (named, yes, for Riff Raff) worships him; he has a poison collection and goes around using two wrongs to make a right. Here’s my not-so-secret shame: I’m not fundamentally a visual person, except for the most conventional (to me) of visuals, and I just don’t get Yuki’s art. Hair shade seems to change from panel to panel; the main characters all have the same face shapes (the little girl Merriweather, Cain’s beloved half-sister, is distinguishable, but mostly because she’s even more like a doll than everybody else) and enormous eyes; and when people get mad, jealous, or embarrassed, their faces turn into vampire caricatures that I can’t make fit into the rest of the artwork. Instead of getting sucked into the baroque family dramas—incest and possessed women, with whatever meaning of “possessed” you can imagine, figure prominently—I was distanced, and it doesn’t work with distance. P.S.: If Yuki is your thing, and you want these volumes, drop me a note.
Kara, Demon Diary, vols. 1 & 2: Okay, I clearly had a fundamental misunderstanding about my preferences with the woman who sold me this stack of manga. This is kind of the story of a young boy being trained to be a demon lord though he has no temperament for it and would rather blow bubbles and giggle, or some such. So he does a lot of dumb stuff and the experienced demon training him gets mad. In volume 2, there’s a meta moment where one character insists that he’s the protagonist because he got bigger panels in the previous installment, and the artist and the writer pop up in the corner to shrug and snipe about it. The “face changes to caricature for anger/embarrassment/jealousy” thing is in full effect, except that people’s emotions swung so wildly that I spent most of my time cringing. Demon lords kill a lot of people, but somehow that doesn’t translate to any angst, and the slashiness (I think—I was a bit surprised when someone I would have sworn was a boy turned out to be a girl; but then there was a short story at the end pf vol. 1 that more clearly featured boy/boy UST, at least, so I’m tentatively going with slashiness in the main story) wasn’t motivated by anything other than “I just have a feeling when I look at him,” and since I didn’t myself have that feeling, it didn’t work for me.
Kaori Yuki, The Cain Saga, vols. 1-4 (in 5 volumes, which is a signal about what’s inside): Earl Cain is a Victorian aristocrat, for values of Victorian aristocrat that are extremely wacky. His birth is shrouded in secret shame; his father hates him and whips him cruelly; his butler Riff (named, yes, for Riff Raff) worships him; he has a poison collection and goes around using two wrongs to make a right. Here’s my not-so-secret shame: I’m not fundamentally a visual person, except for the most conventional (to me) of visuals, and I just don’t get Yuki’s art. Hair shade seems to change from panel to panel; the main characters all have the same face shapes (the little girl Merriweather, Cain’s beloved half-sister, is distinguishable, but mostly because she’s even more like a doll than everybody else) and enormous eyes; and when people get mad, jealous, or embarrassed, their faces turn into vampire caricatures that I can’t make fit into the rest of the artwork. Instead of getting sucked into the baroque family dramas—incest and possessed women, with whatever meaning of “possessed” you can imagine, figure prominently—I was distanced, and it doesn’t work with distance. P.S.: If Yuki is your thing, and you want these volumes, drop me a note.
Kara, Demon Diary, vols. 1 & 2: Okay, I clearly had a fundamental misunderstanding about my preferences with the woman who sold me this stack of manga. This is kind of the story of a young boy being trained to be a demon lord though he has no temperament for it and would rather blow bubbles and giggle, or some such. So he does a lot of dumb stuff and the experienced demon training him gets mad. In volume 2, there’s a meta moment where one character insists that he’s the protagonist because he got bigger panels in the previous installment, and the artist and the writer pop up in the corner to shrug and snipe about it. The “face changes to caricature for anger/embarrassment/jealousy” thing is in full effect, except that people’s emotions swung so wildly that I spent most of my time cringing. Demon lords kill a lot of people, but somehow that doesn’t translate to any angst, and the slashiness (I think—I was a bit surprised when someone I would have sworn was a boy turned out to be a girl; but then there was a short story at the end pf vol. 1 that more clearly featured boy/boy UST, at least, so I’m tentatively going with slashiness in the main story) wasn’t motivated by anything other than “I just have a feeling when I look at him,” and since I didn’t myself have that feeling, it didn’t work for me.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
From:
no subject