Hoshin Engi, by Fujisaki Ryu

[snarp]

Hahaha, I love this manga.

Houshin Engi is a shounen manga based loosely on the Chinese novel The Creation of the Gods. Dakki, a powerful fox demon, has enchanted the Yin emperor Chuu-oh and is destroying the empire by means of her peculiarly high-spirited atrocities - cheerily throwing huge crowds of people into pits of snakes, making excitable cooking shows in which she feeds people to their parents, etc. She's just having so much fun! Sadly, the immortal sennin of the Kongrong Mountains don't appreciate the mess she's making of China, so they send a sennin-in-training named Taikobo to defeat Dakki and her followers.

You know that thing about shounen manga, where the hero is pretty much the strongest guy around by the end of volume five or so? That doesn't happen here. Taikobo is genuinely not very good at fighting, and usually achieves his goals by getting people drunk or getting them mad at him. (He's really good at getting people mad at him.) The fighting he mainly pushes off on the stronger allies he makes throughout the series; he's mostly a stategist rather than a combatant.

There's a scene late in the series where his team is getting beaten up, and one of them insists that he help, only to find that he's passed out from the strain of an earlier, more minor fight; another character points out, reasonably, "He's never really been all that good, you know." This manga ran in Shounen Jump from 1996 to 2000, and I'm pretty sure that the magazine no longer permits this sort of behavior. (He's obliged to get some power-ups for the Final Battle, which I found disappointing.)

Dakki is an extremely enjoyable villainess, and she always remains a threat, and more powerful than Taikobo. This is refreshing, given that characters like her have a habit of being shown up by male villains at some point. Doesn't happen here! However, like Taikobo, Dakki doesn't go in much for physical force, meaning that she doesn't get many traditional fight scenes. She prefers to get things done by manipulating the people around her. It becomes clear pretty quickly that she commits her worst crimes not for their own sake, but for the outrage they engender in Taikobo and the other protagonists. Their hatred is a tool she's using to achieve another goal. (Though she does seem to enjoy watching people get mad at her.)

Though the series has a lot of dark moments - a big chunk of the cast is dead by the end - it's consistently funny even during the finale. A lot of the humor is self-referential; the characters all know that they're in a manga. Taikobo at point wins a fight by transferring himself and his opponent into a 4-panel newspaper comic, and Dakki complains that the plot of the anime diverges too far from the manga. Another guy, defeating Taikobo, temporarily turns the series into an earnest high-school sports comic.

The most powerful Sennin the world, an evil clown named Shinkoyo who declines to take sides in the central dispute, evidently derives his power from the fact that he has read the script. He's constantly feeding information to both Taikobo and Dakki, "to keep things interesting," and provokes fights between their forces when things slow down. When Taikobo and company are gearing up for the final battle, Fujisaki has failed to provide a reason for Taikobo's lazy mentor Roushi to get himself over there - so Shinkoyo kidnaps him, on the grounds that it just wouldn't look right if he missed the finale.

Various other notable things about this manga:

* There's no heterosexual romance. The only non-comic-relief and non-immediately-doomed male-female relationships are parent-child ones, and the one that gets the most page-time is abusive. What's up with that, Fujisaki.

* Dudes do stare soulfully into each other's eyes a lot, though.

* There's a huge cast of characters, but they're nearly all guys; I think there are maybe ten named women, and probably seventy guys. Here, I'll try to list all the women: Dakki, Kibi, Kijin, Chuu-oh's first wife, Nataku's mom, Sengyoku, Ryukitsu Koushu, Hekiun, Hekiun's sister, Supumama, Ko Hiko's wife and sister, Venus, Queen, Madonna, one of Otenkun's subordinates, Yuukyou, Jyoka. Okay, I'm wrong, that's eighteen - but I just found a character guide and counted the names, and it looks like there are about a hundred and thirty characters total. Also, two of the women I listed have no dialog, two more die in the chapter they're introduced in, and another is already dead the first time we see her.

* Taikobo's second-in-command Youzen looks suspiciously similar to Kurama from YuYu Hakusho. Nataku (you knew some version of Nataku was going to be in this comic) looks and acts kinda like Hiei.

* Taikobo rides around on a timid talking hippo named Supushan, who has a Supupapa and Supumama and comes from Supu Valley. How the Moomin family ended up in feudal China is not clear.

* This is a small spoiler: So this manga has the plot of ElfQuest? The sennin turn out to be the descendants of aliens who landed on earth long ago, and the final conflict is whether they should attempt to remake their homeworld on earth, or not. They're basically the wolf riders?

* This is a big spoiler: So I think Taikobo probably has the most complicated origin story ever? He actually beats out the various Syaorans and Sakuras in Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle. Maybe there's some really warped Marvel comics character who's worse, I don't know. I've written down the steps necessary to produce Taikobo. I may have missed some.

1) A space alien named Fukki lands on earth and chills for a few million years.

2) Fukki meets Genshi Tenson in the form of a small child and has its soul split into two pieces. One of these pieces is put into the human baby Ryo Bo, who will grow up to be Taikoubou; the other half becomes Genshi Tenson's original apprentice Oh Eki.

3) Oh Eki, who by this point doesn't remember that he's a space alien, is traded to Youzen's dad, Tsuten Kyoshu, in exchange for Youzen. He is locked up in a magical prison that turns him into a youkai (this seems to just mean that your ears turn pointy) and raised there by Dakki to be evil and have trouble getting through metal detectors. His name is now Otenkun. He wants revenge on Youzen, Tsuten Kyoshu, and Genshi Tenson, roughly in that order - but not on Dakki, whom he basically hates, but thinks of as his mother.

At some point either before or after all this, Otenkun's soul is split into three pieces. The pieces are physically identical, have the same abilities, and seem to have a communal memory, but they have different goals; the first two are mainly destruction-oriented, while the last just really likes sitting in a dark room and plotting.

Each Otenkun represents, I guess, one sixth of the original Fukki, unless the first one represents one quarter and the second two one eighth apiece. Maybe the most reasonable thing is to assume that the broody one represents one quarter?

4) Meanwhile, Ryo Bo's family has been murdered on Dakki's orders. Genshi Tenson takes him in as Oh Eki's replacement and renames him Taikobo. Taikobo wants revenge on Dakki.

5) One of the Otenkuns publicly humiliates Youzen, kills Youzen's mentor, and kills Tsuten Kyoshu; Youzen kills him. A second Otenkun kills Hiko and yells a lot at Genshi Tenson; I forget who kills him, but he dies pretty content with his day's work, which is surprising considering that he accomplished rather less than Otenkun 1, who died still raving at Youzen.

Anyway, at this point either one third (two one-sixth portions), one quarter (two one-eighth portions), or one-sixth-plus-one-eighth of Fukki's soul has been houshined. We don't actually see either of the extra Otenkun-souls when the hoshindai opens, though.

6) Kibi kills Taikobo and his soul is captured by the third Otenkun before it can reach the houshindai. So that he can go back to the world of the living, Taikobo reluctantly merges his soul with Otenkun's, causing them to regain Fukki's memories. But the resulting being looks and acts like Taikobo, except that he now apparently considers Dakki his mother. Whaaat.

Comments

[nijibug]

not sure if brain thoroughly broken or seized by a burning need to read houshin engi

[snarp]

The two need not be mutually exclusive, surely!