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Papillon 1, by Miwa Ueda
Sep. 15th, 2010 05:09 pm(I'm thinking of just setting up a separate blog for reviews like this. I'm going to call it "Unpleasant Manga Reviews." I like that title; it's straightforward.)
There is a person whom you may have met. She - though she defies barriers of gender, I'll call her "she" - leads a life of terrible persecution. She is impotent to improve her situation, for her every remedy is denied her by her many oppressors. She is unloved by her parents, neglected by her boyfriend, ignored by her friends. She has illnesses that defy ordinary medical classification. Her cat's missing. She is constantly overwhelmed by woe, wracked with orgiastic pangs of misery. If she has not yet discovered pseuicide, it's only a matter of time.
She does not act as if she realizes how manipulative she is, and I actually don't think she does. Her problem is that she is, basically, a sociopath. She believes on some unexamined level that her emotional needs are the most important thing in the world. So in her mind, when someone doesn't do exactly what she wants, it's not because they have their own needs - it's simply because they want to hurt her. Her extravagant misery is a punishment for them, and a goad, and sometimes it works; there will inevitably be a few people who can be convinced that they owe her something.
Papillon is the story that this person would write about herself. Ageha is a shy girl with freckles, glasses, and no self-confidence. She has a crush on a handsome but weak-willed guy named Ryuusei, but can never work up the nerve to speak to him. One day, she's bullied by a guy named Kyuu, who gets into her things and finds a photo of Ryuusei that she keeps. He encourages her to pursue him, scribbling a speech bubble saying "We're going out!" on the photo as a motivational device.
Ageha has a sister, the outgoing and popular Hana, who decides to ensnare the hapless Ryuusei to make Ageha miserable. Ageha's evil, ugly best friend goes through Ageha's things while she's out of the room and shows the photo to everyone. Ageha is mocked by her entire class, and in the final blow, set aside by Ryuusei on the roof of the school. She prepares to hurl herself to her death. Pity her!
We don't, because Ageha's victimhood comes off as calculated. I got to the part where she climbed the fence to jump off, and I just thought, "wait - is she going to kill herself to make everybody feel bad?" On the next page, Kyuu shows up and says, "I can see your underwear," so she stops killing herself for a second to tell him she's going to die because he was mean to her. Apparently I was right.
Here's the thing: If Ageha was so embarrassed by that picture, and if she knew her friend sometimes got into her stuff - and she clearly did know - then why was she carrying it around with her? Did she want it to be found? She "accidentally" lets Hana find out that she likes Ryuusei. Does she want Hana to mess with her? And all she knows about Ryuusei is that he's 1) hot and 2) possibly a jerk - they knew each other as children, but he never acknowledges her now. Is she trying to set herself up? I could suspend my disbelief for one or two preventable incidents like these, but the manga is full of them. Ageha is a professional victim.
This series could almost be satire, and there's something suspiciously meta in the fact that Ageha's evil sister Hana is her identical twin. Also notable is the scene in which, as Hana disrupts a hospital visit to their dying grandmother, Ageha stands around frets about how this will make her look to Ryuusei. But the tone of these scenes is entirely sincere. We're expected to believe that not only is Ageha the heroine, she's the kind of heroine who can do wrong.
The passive, put-upon heroine is one of the shoujo genre's most irritating tropes, and could stand to be whacked around a little. But if Papillon is doing that, it's doing it on a level so subtle that it's practically subconscious.
There is a person whom you may have met. She - though she defies barriers of gender, I'll call her "she" - leads a life of terrible persecution. She is impotent to improve her situation, for her every remedy is denied her by her many oppressors. She is unloved by her parents, neglected by her boyfriend, ignored by her friends. She has illnesses that defy ordinary medical classification. Her cat's missing. She is constantly overwhelmed by woe, wracked with orgiastic pangs of misery. If she has not yet discovered pseuicide, it's only a matter of time.
She does not act as if she realizes how manipulative she is, and I actually don't think she does. Her problem is that she is, basically, a sociopath. She believes on some unexamined level that her emotional needs are the most important thing in the world. So in her mind, when someone doesn't do exactly what she wants, it's not because they have their own needs - it's simply because they want to hurt her. Her extravagant misery is a punishment for them, and a goad, and sometimes it works; there will inevitably be a few people who can be convinced that they owe her something.
Papillon is the story that this person would write about herself. Ageha is a shy girl with freckles, glasses, and no self-confidence. She has a crush on a handsome but weak-willed guy named Ryuusei, but can never work up the nerve to speak to him. One day, she's bullied by a guy named Kyuu, who gets into her things and finds a photo of Ryuusei that she keeps. He encourages her to pursue him, scribbling a speech bubble saying "We're going out!" on the photo as a motivational device.
Ageha has a sister, the outgoing and popular Hana, who decides to ensnare the hapless Ryuusei to make Ageha miserable. Ageha's evil, ugly best friend goes through Ageha's things while she's out of the room and shows the photo to everyone. Ageha is mocked by her entire class, and in the final blow, set aside by Ryuusei on the roof of the school. She prepares to hurl herself to her death. Pity her!
We don't, because Ageha's victimhood comes off as calculated. I got to the part where she climbed the fence to jump off, and I just thought, "wait - is she going to kill herself to make everybody feel bad?" On the next page, Kyuu shows up and says, "I can see your underwear," so she stops killing herself for a second to tell him she's going to die because he was mean to her. Apparently I was right.
Here's the thing: If Ageha was so embarrassed by that picture, and if she knew her friend sometimes got into her stuff - and she clearly did know - then why was she carrying it around with her? Did she want it to be found? She "accidentally" lets Hana find out that she likes Ryuusei. Does she want Hana to mess with her? And all she knows about Ryuusei is that he's 1) hot and 2) possibly a jerk - they knew each other as children, but he never acknowledges her now. Is she trying to set herself up? I could suspend my disbelief for one or two preventable incidents like these, but the manga is full of them. Ageha is a professional victim.
This series could almost be satire, and there's something suspiciously meta in the fact that Ageha's evil sister Hana is her identical twin. Also notable is the scene in which, as Hana disrupts a hospital visit to their dying grandmother, Ageha stands around frets about how this will make her look to Ryuusei. But the tone of these scenes is entirely sincere. We're expected to believe that not only is Ageha the heroine, she's the kind of heroine who can do wrong.
The passive, put-upon heroine is one of the shoujo genre's most irritating tropes, and could stand to be whacked around a little. But if Papillon is doing that, it's doing it on a level so subtle that it's practically subconscious.
