I Am Completely Serious

Over the past year, I've made a lot of long, grumpy posts about books/video games/etc that have disappointed me. (I've even got two sitting on the desktop unfinished right now.) I have written relatively few positive posts about stuff I like. My resolution is that for every discrete media item I take the time to thrash at, I will also talk about something that was good.

(I'm not going as far as "expend as many words on positivity as negativity," because I am a jerk and that is impossible. Perhaps it will be my son who finally brings balance to the force.)

To get started, I have recently read and liked these shounen manga which have "x" in their titles for no good reason:

Hayate x Blade, by Shizuru Hayashiya - A comedy shounen manga about a private girls' school with mandatory swordfights. The girls have to fight in pairs and get a gradually-increasing amount of money for each fight they win. The Kind-Hearted-Idiot-Type title character, Hayate, needs the money to save an indebted orphanage (of course!), while her partner Ayana, the Short-Tempered-Straight-Man, wants to redeem herself for having hurt her original partner.

Every plotline goes like this:

* Two girls are having problems with their relationship! Oh noes!

* Hayate tries to fix this in improbable and counterproductive ways. She hits on Ayana, Ayana hits her.

* Fight scene! "NOW I'LL SHOW YOU MY TRUE POWER" etc

* Hayate's plans have failed, but the girls probably work it out anyway.

The manga with the most similar tone is probably Ouran High School Host Club: it fulfills all the parameters of its genre, but it's always self-aware and never takes itself too seriously. It's gotten slightly darker as the series has progressed - little piles of angst have accumulated in every corner at this point - but Hayashiya has too much sense of perspective to let things get too heavy.

Hunter x Hunter, by Yoshihiro Togashi - So you know how at the end of Yu Yu Hakusho, Yusuke, Kurama, and Hiei go into the demon world where everything's all brutal and decadent and better-drawn? And there's no longer any standard shounen-manga black-and-white moral conflict - just people with conflicting loyalties doing battle and betraying each other in increasingly baroque ways? (And Mukuro!) And then it ends really suddenly without quite resolving in a satisfying way. (And Mukuro gets -ed over.)

Hunter x Hunter is essentially Togashi trying for a re-do of that last arc. Its protagonists, Gon and Killua, are two adorable little martial artist kids who are not exactly sociopaths. They care about their friends, and Gon has kind of an abstract allegiance to the idea of not murdering anyone without a really good reason. But he'll do just about anything else. There's not a lot separating them from the mass-murdering villains - and there's dialog making this explicit. They're just on different sides, is all.

There are no innocents in this series. At one point a character becomes bodyguard to a defenseless young woman; she turns out to be a rapacious collector of black-market human body parts, and is never in any physical danger against which she needs protection. The cast consists almost exclusively of people who would be villains or, at best, the morally-gray rival in any other series. Hunter x Hunter a bizarre mutant species of shounen manga, in which the essential phrase, "I'll protect you!" is never once uttered. It's refreshingly honest.

HxH has been one of my favorite manga since I was in high school. I am currently engaged in probably my tenth re-read of the York Shin Auction storyline, which satisfyingly combines nearly every shounen manga element I like. My only serious problem with it is Togashi's inevitably weird treatment of his female characters.