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thevalleyisjolly · 2 years

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widofjord, maybe?

Ooh, thanks Thane!

when I started shipping it if I did:

Pretty early on in Campaign 2, because I remember being invested enough by Episode 44 that I got in a tangle with particularly aggressive Fj*rester fan.

my thoughts:

It's about balancing each other out, keeping each other in check, that slow to grow but mutual respect and acknowledgement of each other, how neither of them would claim to be leaders and yet both take up unofficial mantles of responsibility, taking the hurt and injustice and trauma of their pasts and figuring out who they want to be here and now. Not narrative mirrors- but maybe parallel paths, two people sharing a common road, falling into equal step for a while.

what makes me happy about them:

The way they started out, so wary and suspicious of each other, like two cats circling, and then the way they became, the trust and the respect.

what makes me sad about them:

On a meta-ish level, that we saw less of their interactions/relationship later on in the campaign?

things done in fanfic that annoy me:

I haven't actually read a Widofjord fic in a long while, but I guess anything that overlooks how messy and complicated these boys are? Fair do's if you just want to read them boning or being cutesy in a modern AU, no judgment here. I'm just a fan of early-stage Widofjord, where they're still sizing each other up, butting heads (but oh, it's so good because you can see where both of them come from and neither is wholly right or wholly wrong), recklessly pushing each other on.

who I'd be comfortable them ending up with, if not each other:

I love Shadowgast for many of the same reasons that I love Widofjord, so Essek and Caleb for sure. There's also an absolutely tragic lack of queerplatonic Fjord/Caduceus out there, which I think could be super interesting to explore. I actually don't mind in-game canon Fj*rester, I just can't stand what some very loud elements of the fandom have made it.

my happily ever after for them:

I actually like them as an impermanent ship, I don't think a relationship has to last forever in order for it to be meaningful, and I think a 'happily ever after' for these two would probably look like a period of time (long or short) where they're together, learning from and building off of each other, before a mutual agreement to remain friends. So kind of like canon Shadowgast.

who is the big spoon/little spoon:

I don't see there being a designated regular big spoon/little spoon, but Fjord does often end up being the big spoon more often than not.

what is their favourite non-sexual activity:

Testing the limits of their own abilities (and I don't mean that in a sexy way). Listen, they're both very curious and intelligent people, they would absolutely spend hours figuring out exactly how an eldritch blast ("Aæeldreitchh bleyaaaaast") works, what exactly it's capable of, where its limits are, if there are any ways to expand what it can do, how to change the colour aesthetic...

Which reminds me, both of them know the importance of presentation and aesthetics, so they also like dressing up. Caleb will go out shopping with Jester and Caduceus, and Fjord will mix and match and arrange what he brings home into fetching ensembles. Although Caleb does have a sense of style and will frequently make his own suggestions, "sleek wizard chic" does not a varied wardrobe make. Sometimes you want a cozy cableknit sweater for settling down with a good book or walking around the deck of your ship!

#thanks thane!

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dereksmcgrath · 3 years

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While I appreciate how heartfelt this chapter was, I don’t like noticing the seams in a story on first reading--because, more often than not, it’s because the story is barely hanging together, not because I’m that good at analysis.

“Best Friend, Part 2,” Magu-chan: God of Destruction, Chapter 60. By Kei Kamiki, translation by Christine Dashiell, lettering by Erika Terriquez. Available from Viz.

As much as I enjoy imagining what happens behind the scenes between a comics creator and their editor, I have to preface the following that I have not done any research to know what Kei Kamiki went through in pitching, designing, and continuing Magu-chan. But with a chapter like this one, I can’t help but see what I imagine are the seams of the story being easier to make out. The first chapter was just Ruru and Magu. While we could anticipate some details about who Ruru’s parents were, that she likely went to school, and that someone released Magu, we didn’t know much else about any potential supporting cast, including classmates who would be introduced later.

Two of those classmates have been Kikyo and Yuika, who have been the focus for this and the previous chapter. When I wrote about the previous chapter, I had said, in the nicest way I could muster, that giving attention to these two minor characters after more than 50 chapters seemed like too little too late. But as I just said, it’s not like there were many other options. Let’s say Kamiki didn’t imagine Kikyo and Yuika yet when writing Chapter 1: then of course we wouldn’t get a chance to progress these two characters until now, because their creation is more recent. Let’s say Kaimiki did imagine Kikyo and Yuika even before writing Chapter 1: then of course we wouldn’t get a chance to delve into their back story, because we have a main cast to worry about first.

I’m trying to write all of this as a reflection of the writing process, not to necessarily say that this is a bad chapter, or that between this and the previous chapter that it has amounted to a bad two-chapter arc. But when the seams are showing that much more obviously, I’m going to end up writing more about the plot elements, because they are so obvious, compared to just writing about what I enjoyed in the visual art and storytelling.

Each of these two chapters has begun with flashbacks that have added far more to Kikyo and Yuika’s back stories, including explaining how the two became friends and some details about their family lives. But what we learn at the beginning of Chapter 60 doesn’t mesh with what I expected.

For example, we’re told Yuika may have a “difficult” home life, not something I expected for this rambunctious ball of energy with multiple siblings. From all appearances, I never took it that her home life was difficult. Is it a financial problem? Yuika is shown to be playing a Switch, which, on top of having multiple siblings, is yet another high expense. Are her parents strict? From what else this chapter shows, the parent who tells her to get to school is rather hands-off, not shown to coerce her back to classes and more befuddled and upset. Of course lax and angry parenting are all difficult; it’s just not what I expected, that toxic mix of being uninvolved but also paradoxically high-strung. All of this would explain why Yuika only finally drops any facade when Zonze Ge exerts his depressive influence over her, so that she can be honest about how devastated she feels with Kikyo potentially going to another high school.

We also learn from these first pages that Kikyo is an only child, something easy enough to infer from the previous chapter. While I had thought Kikyo’s interest in the occult and cryptids was an outlet to escape boredom, I was surprised the chapter revealed it’s more so that Kikyo has this innate interest in the supernatural--and feels like she’s had to suppress that aspect of herself to appease the expectations of her parents and teachers, to be a model student. That’s not the direction I expected, and I wish that characterization was more obvious to me in the previous chapter, seeing as her fixation on the supernatural has been part of her characterization since her first appearance. Again, I’m thinking more about the storytelling elements than enjoying the work itself, but if this story could be revised for adaptation, perhaps for an anime, I would have liked Kikyo to have been a minor presence before her first appearance as one of Ruru’s classmates, hovering in the background, unassuming--but maybe slowly realizing Ruru has an association with these chibi eldritch gods so that, when Kikyo shows her fascination with the supernatural, it’s more of a shock like it would be to her teachers and parents.

I do wish I had more knowledge about curriculum in typical Japanese education, as that would help me better understand the pressures Kikyo feels, and the separation Kikyo and Yuika would go through, and whether how this chapter concludes is as typical as I expect but also, for an educator like me, frustrating. As a reader and fan of this series, I appreciate the symbolic value of Magu burning up Kikyo’s notes, encouraging her to find other forms of knowledge by spending her high school years with her best friend. As an educator and someone who was a straight-A student through high school, I am horrified seeing all those notes getting destroyed--what a waste!

I am certainly not in the age group for this story, but I do have the experiences to sympathize with what it is like pursuing advanced educational options that potentially separated me from previously close friends. A lot of this story is about the reality of how childhood friends drift apart over time, so, when this manga refuses to confront that reality more directly, it’s bothersome. I don’t mean that the more magical and fantastic elements affect that reality: Magu-chan and Glassy posing as “extra-terrorestrials” (nice Disney World reference there, Kamiki and Dashiell) doesn’t distract from the mundanity of Yuika and Kikyo’s dilemma. The chibi gods’ ploy actually lends some more weight to this everyday problem.

No, what I mean is that this story feels like it was confronting a simple reality but pursued a solution that I’m not sure is as realistic, and is just forestalling another reality. As people get older, even as friendships persist, people do experience greater distance, physical or emotional, not necessarily because the friendship ends, but actually because we meet more and more people, have more and more relationships, so time becomes more limited, distance grows, and getting back to what we had before is more challenging. It’s not so different from the literal physical distance Kikyo has to cross to encounter cryptids and aliens--but even then, this series has over-simplified things so much, actually, no, it’s not that difficult for Kikyo to reach out and touch the supernatural, just as it’s not difficult for her to come up with a simple solution to stay with Yuika and avoid the challenging circumstances that would have made for a more emotionally compelling story, and one that would have disrupted the flatness some shonen, gag, and other serialized manga depend on. Imagine if Kikyo did go to the better high school and did separate from Yuika. I know I have said having static characters can be a good thing for this kind of a series, but how would it affect each character’s progression if Kikyo had left, rather than leaving things pretty much the same as they started?

Magu-chan: God of Destruction, by its title, is supposed to contain within it both the cutesy friendship details invoked by “-chan” and the ominous aspects of “destruction” to create bittersweet stories. I think this series has peaked so far with Ruru giving up the dream of remaining with her father; I think this two-chapter arc has avoided the difficult question of future separation for Kikyo and Yuika, delaying what will be an inevitable distancing between the two, whether by having them go to separate high schools (a direction this story could have taken to embrace that bittersweet tone now as the manga has in the past) or delay the inevitable (but I would hope less drastic) separation the two will have as they take on different careers and life trajectories.

Unless this manga is setting up a potential romance between these two--which I could see happen for Yuika and Kikyo, given their personalities and closeness. Although, that opens up a debate I have with a lot of series--how do we foster more representations of non-heteronormative romantic relationships, but also, how do we foster more representations of same-gender friendships that allow for closeness between characters without automatically reading their closeness as only romantic--and I don’t think I’m the one to write about that topic just yet.

Going back to what I said a moment ago, many manga depend on a certain flatness: not much is allowed to change. Character progression remains possible, little details can change in the setting and the time period. But in some cases, to remain long-lasting, the goal has to stay the same (Naruto can’t be hokage yet without changing the entire story; Izuku can’t be the Number One Hero yet without changing the entire story). Or, if the goal stays the same (to educate the audience about boxing, for example), then the characters have to age out and be swapped out (rookie Ippo either needs to become the champion or retire so that new boxers can enter the story and, for the audience, be that vicarious experience to learn more about the sport).

So, introducing high school to Magu-chan is actually a big deal--and I can’t say I’m not disappointed a more drastic choice wasn’t made to separate Yuika, Kikyo, and even Ruru and the others to see what could change in interpersonal dynamics. Granted, this series is only up to its 60th chapter, and the characters we have seen so far have not worn out their welcome (give or take Uneras), so I understand the point of keeping this group together just a bit longer. I guess I’m bothered that we were extended the opportunity for a game changer, and rather than having that change affect the relationships between characters in a significant way, or coercing a vastly different characterization from most of them (save Yuika), this chapter maintained the status quo and really just filled in back story instead of progressing the story forward. It’s not bad; it just feels like a missed opportunity.

The ending to this chapter also felt rushed--but, as I’ll say more later this week, a lot of chapters out of Shonen Jump this week also felt rushed. I need to check the page count, because it felt as if some story beat or detail got cut from some of the other series I was reading on Sunday (My Hero Academia and Blue Box, for example) and ended abruptly or had awkward pacing.

I like that the last panel for this chapter of Magu-chan shows Yuika and Kikyo together; I don’t like that something feels understated, by having the two of them facing away from us so we don’t see more of their facial reactions. This ambiguity compounds with something else: it’s left hanging just what exactly Kikyo meant by “something” she still wants to learn with her middle school friends in high school.

This ending felt very much like the opening narration to Toradora, where that “thing” is hard for Taiga and Ryuji to say, because it was a promise that the series was making, that eventually it would define that “thing” before settling on defining it as Taiga and Ryuji’s love for each other. If Kikyo and Yuika were the main characters to this manga, I’d have that same confidence that we’d eventually learn what that “something” is when the time was right. But because these two are not our main characters, I’m worried this “something”--which, granted, should probably be more obvious to me--is going to be left dangling and undefined for a long time before Kamiki gives Kikyo and Yuika the spotlight again. I hope that spotlight will shine on them sooner rather than later, because, despite all my complaints, this was a compelling enough two-parter, and if Kamiki could fill in more back story for the supporting cast in this manner, it can open up more heartfelt storytelling options--not bad, all things considered, for a series about tiny eldritch gods hanging out with middle schoolers.

#magu chan: god of destruction #manga review

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