Case (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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fandomsecrets2015-09-19 03:49 pm
case) wrote in fandomsecrets2015-09-19 03:49 pm
[ SECRET POST #3181 ]
⌈ Secret Post #3181 ⌋
Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.
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09. [WARNING for rape]
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Notes:
Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 070 secrets from Secret Submission Post #455.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.
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(Anonymous) 2015-09-19 08:37 pm (UTC)(link)no subject
(Anonymous) 2015-09-19 09:02 pm (UTC)(link)he is, by far, the only interesting character in a manga about football.
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(Anonymous) 2015-09-19 11:36 pm (UTC)(link)wow, little harsh. He's pretty complex, but I'd say Shien, Takami, Panther, Musashi, Yukimitsu or maybe even Juumonji could have carried a good, modern sports story like ES21. And Hiruma, like I was mulling over, isn't even the main character.
Maybe not Yukimitsu. His training regime is so ridiculously unhealthy that I don't really think the author could be shown condoning it any more than he already does. It's pretty censored in the adaptation to anime.
Ah wait, not even kidding here, perhaps you've only watched the anime? It's a little pared down. A lot of the characters aren't given room to breathe. It's a very good manga. One of those ones which feels like the second you close the book the city will keep moving.
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I don't think Hiruma should've been the main character either, but man, Sena was boring as hell. I'd rather have read about ANY other character at all.
(ETA: Hiruma's actual dad is a Disgaea demon and nothing will convince me otherwise.)
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(Anonymous) 2015-09-19 11:46 pm (UTC)(link)I totally thought of Sakuraba when I was writing that, but then I thought he might be a bit obvious? Well, maybe Panther is too. They've both got ~heroic traits~ out the wazzoo. Maybe Sakuraba would seem like a bit of a Marty Stu if done wrong as a protagonist - like, his flaw is that he's too beautiful and girls love him too much? It's so HARD to go to a prestigious school and have a well-paying side job (that most schools would kick you out for) AND make it onto the field for an elite sports team in first year? I mean, the struggle is real and my heart breaks for him, but he could have gone really badly wrong with much more screentime. I think maybe when Shien bottomed out he might have gone deeper than Sakuraba, who seems fairly emotionally healthy.
Sena's sweet, though. I find him unobjectionable and occasionally very admirable. His blandness felt like it was an intentional way to deal with a big silly ensemble team fairly well. If Sena was more interesting, Hiruma might not have had room to stealthily become so well written. And I love re-reading and watching Sena stop fearing Hiruma, trust Hiruma, and eventually become just a little more like Hiruma.
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For Sena it wasn't that he had anything wrong with him, more that he could've been copy/pasted into the role of any wide-eyed naive generic shounen hero, and they into him. Find/replace Kobayakawa Sena and Sawada Tsunayoshi and practically nothing changes. The determined newbie is a good plot vehicle, but it's not really interesting or memorable in the long run when there's nothing ELSE unique about him...
What I REALLY would've liked to see is somewhere before the final arc, Sena actually handing over the story to Hiruma and co. Sena staying the main character and plot point-of-view from the readers' perspective, but handing things over in-character and saying yeah, the story includes the rest of them now, but actually, this was Hiruma/Musashi/Kurita's story all along. That's something I've never seen happen.
(ETA: BUT LET US GEEK OUT OVER ES21, who is your favorite team, anon?)
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(Anonymous) 2015-09-20 12:31 am (UTC)(link)Oh yeah sure, there's no doubt Sakuraba COULD have been an incredible protagonist, and I do think he's kind of under-utilised (I've been looking recently at how the anime padded his scenes and I get it), I'm just thinking early parts of a story focused on him could have been dismissed or criticised really easily.
I just read your earlier ETA and I'm thinking about his dad still. See I always wondered on first reading if it'd be like an angel/demon tropes thing - not that far-fetched for ES21, the manga that includes Habashira Rui and his family. Angel mother, demon father, strife in the family and doesn't like going home or w/e. But we see Hiruma's dad. Briefly. He looks SO normal in what we're shown. And we don't see his mother at all, and given that he clearly lives a very abnormal life... I mean let's break it down, actual facts we know about Hiruma Yoichi:
- seems to have been socially isolated at the start of middle school
- spent a lot of time on an American military base
- c.f. access to illegal weaponry, fluent scuzzy English, love of American Football
- is ridiculously intelligent
- hung out with two natural outcasts and with a ridiculous amount of drive spent the next few years trying to have a football team with only three players
- is basically only good at passing and had to practice like hell to even get that
- inhuman physical traits (ears, teeth)
- at some point chooses to exaggerate his own physical traits by growing out his nails ridiculously, bleaching his hair blonde and getting his ears pierced twice in each lobe
Things we do not know about Hiruma:
- parent's names
- address
- strictly speaking, his motivation
Things I think are being implied about Hiruma, or that we have our attention drawn to:
- there is extreme tension between Hiruma and his father.
- his mother is not in the picture???
- he possibly doesn't live with his parents after middle school? Radical change in appearance, very good at getting money, manipulating the legal and school system, physical dwelling is intentionally obscured
- maybe lives in the clubhouse? Not healthy, I don't think they have heating in there! Maybe lives in some kind of grim apartment building or hotel (seems to live in a square building of some kind in obscured image)
- did he do all this because he wanted to see Kurita succeed?
- is he TRYING TO BE THE KIND OF FATHER FIGURE HE WISHES HE HAD BECAUSE IT MAKES HIM FEEL BETTER?
- the anime plays up the fatherly role! There's a few added little bits I've spotted recently which show him watching Sena a lot, and only intervening if he's needed.
Things the manga is willing to show:
- underage smoking (quite a lot and is a plot point)
- illegal weaponry
- alcoholism
- stupid and cruel training
- shitty shaming parenting
- animal cruelty, a bit, played up for laughs
- underage drinking, to the point of getting fucking wrecked and waking up in an animal enclosure at the zoo
- teenagers breaking each other's bones, by accident and on purpose
- racism, at length
- bullying (emotional, physical, protracted)
- blackmail, so much fucking blackmail
- nudity, on occasion
- cheating on tests, in homework, in football
- what seemed like really quite strong implied sexual threat with Agon and Mamori
- that one kiss with Togano and Kuroki in the anime, just sayin'
Things the manga is not willing to show
- HIRUMA YOICHI'S FUCKING HOME LIFE
Like I get that the mangaka probably wasn't implying anything by not including it, but then again for a while they draw attention to the issue, at that one match his dad attends. So is it something specific they had in mind, but weren't comfortable drawing? Or didn't feel able to have published in the host magazine? Where all that other stuff went down fine?
Did they decide they couldn't live up to expectations? That Hiruma needed his mystique? Probably. But they eventually show him eating, sleeping, being injured and feeling pain (twice), getting emotional about the past, making bad decisions based on his attachments and desires, getting threatened, losing matches...? The slow humanisation of Hiruma (as Sena gets to understand him a bit better) is definitely a theme, even though Sena often misreads him.
So since the manga ended I've tried to come up with some plausible headcanons for Hiruma. Currently my pet one is that there's some kind of basically intractable flaw in his relationship with his dad, and that his mum walked out on them. Like his dad's schizophrenic and through no fault of his own can't always be a suitable and attached parent. But the implication of his brief appearance at that one match is that Hiruma has EARNED something from him, like Juumonji and Yukimitsu had to with their parents.
WHY? WHY IS THEIR RELATIONSHIP BROKEN? AND WHY CAN FOOTBALL HELP TO FIX IT? I am angry again, like a monkey punching a Rubik's cube.
And to come back to this post, I think there's a few really nice moments which are trying to say Now Sena Is The Guy, For He Understands At Last Each Man On His Team, but it could definitely have been done more thoroughly. Not a fan of Reborn as I could never appreciate Tsunayoshi - and I think Sena has at least a little more agency than that. But he really needs a good father figure who can provide him with the self-belief to become something unconventional, meeting his potential (to go pro) - remember those early hints from time to time that Sena kind of idolises his father, even though his father's definitely meant to be a boring guy, with no particularly diverting psychological or physical traits? Hiruma is definitely the opposite of that, and is acting in Sena's interest from the start, despite everything.
And I am boring, so my favourite team is the Devilbats, because they're the guys we get to know! Every other team's just represented by a few players really, after all. And I know it's a cop-out, but I like the White Knights players, even if I find their school/backstory a bit overblown. I'm very fond of Shien, but his team's a bit silly. The team I'd be happiest to see show up in the story all of a sudden, if it was still being written, are the Aliens/Shuttles, who just have lovely interactions and are really sweet, even if. All that stuff with their coach. I appreciate the Sphinx a bit more this time around too (I'm rewatching). Banba's a boss, and I like his team's stoic samurai attitude, even if they might not recognise it as such.
longest comment ever, I think about Hiruma a lot
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(If you like Hiruma you'd probably like Laharl and Etna in the original game!)
Mostly I take his home life as handwaved like everything else, why the Sphinx are randomly Egyptian or why the Spiders are randomly musical - demonic is the theme of the Devilbats, so Hiruma is That Guy that has to represent it in body and spirit, and stuff (since none of the others do at all, and theme had to come from SOMEwhere). I don't think the author really thought about it further than that, or at least it doesn't seem like that to me.
And nobody in-universe seems to notice that anything is weird or unnatural after the first few chapters that there are random bands of Japanese (?) people roaming around dressed as Egyptian pharaohs and Cowboys (????) and stuff...
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(Anonymous) 2015-09-20 01:03 am (UTC)(link)Which I would totally be down with! Except the stuff with his dad is NEARLY a plot point. It was like they drove towards a plot point and then veered off, beeping as they drove over the horizon.
And the odd thing is, obviously the team theming is very, very silly, but it is brought up in canon! The Taiyou Sphinx are near a beach, I believe, and have a very silly tanning culture at the school, and I think the headteacher has a bunch of money and a fetish for Egyptology, or the coach does, which is supposed to be the reason for the completely ridiculous architecture, and the team name. And with the Seibu Wild Gunmen it's totally just the coach's thing, plus Shien is basically the only one who dresses the part apart from him, and he's probably mildly trying to disguise himself. It's not that ES21 needs to be logical, it's that when you pick it apart it usually is.
FWIW, haven't played Disgaea, do have a good friend who lives up a mountain and watches anime every night. He'd had no exposure to ES21 until recently (avoided longer series while he was getting through One Piece, I believe) and straight away spotted a resemblance to an earlier sports anime character - that one guy from History's Strongest Disciple, Kenichi? Problem is that show looks grody as hell in terms of how it treats its female characters, so I'm not super interested in finding out if there could have been an influence there. But he's a 'nasty' motivator who resembles a demon and kicks a bland main character into joining his athletic pursuit, and it does slightly predate ES21.
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That's the only way it makes thematic sense to me, Hiruma being so much a part of the universe that he's taken on those traits too - having just enough there to nominally justify their weirdness if you try get down to brass tacks about it but no further than that (like WHY was the head teacher an Egypt fetishist? why are all the students buying in? why would Harao go so far as to BUY A RACING CAMEL for $300,000?).
If Hiruma is one of Those Guys (whose drives to win mostly aren't explained either, they just exist) only his team failed and ditched, so he has to make a new one made of normal people who AREN'T normally Those Guys, and take them to the Christmas Bowl... that's actually more interesting, I think. Then all his hinted at backstory kind of makes sense, if it's there TO be hinted at but not shown, since Hiruma isn't one of the normal people and actually in the Operates-Under-Shounen-Rules group, only he's getting dragged into being humanized by Sena and the team who try to get to know him, which works, but only partially.
Now I'm getting even more weird unrelated headcanon. That kind of veered off randomly, sorry.
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(Anonymous) 2015-09-20 01:24 am (UTC)(link)I have an MA in postmodern lit. I LIVE for this stuff. A manga where stuff like that is slightly more blatant would be amazing to me. I already get a big kick out of how Musashi doesn't buy Hiruma's crap at all. His powers do not work here~
To me it's only conspicuous if a Devilbat's home life isn't shown. They operate under more Real World rules than characters with less screen time. I mean Harao we see like twice, right? And Banba's the character who ends up being more important. So he's less ridiculous.
It just bugs me that they seem to have had something in mind when his dad shows up to the match, especially when some of Hiruma's characterisation has been associated with fatherliness. It comes back to the idea that he EARNED something. When the other players start to get their family to the games, we always learn a little bit about those dynamics. There's so much the author and artist seem to have had in mind there! Did you ever notice that Kuroki's prolly mixed-race? And Monta's mum's young enough that the anime seems to find her scandalous, and cut her scene? Ishimaru's the eldest of five siblings! The Ha Brothers have names which imply their birth order corresponds to the order they shout HAH to things in! The creative team were having so much fun with details for the Devilbats. I can't think they didn't have SOMETHING in mind with Hiruma, and he's got precious little mystique left by the end of the story.
Anyway, for now, gotta go to bed. I don't live in your time zone. :P
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Though it was also interesting that his whole fight was about the philosophy behind basketball, and not just the games themselves.
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(Anonymous) 2015-09-20 12:34 am (UTC)(link)