[ SECRET POST #3252 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #3252 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 047 secrets from Secret Submission Post #465.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 1 2 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Ohh Banana Fish secret.

I had the entire series in English and then I gave it all away to a friend because I had to move house... she loves it too, though haha.

it's been a while since I last read it, but I do remember feeling betrayed by the ending. Ash's death is just so... pointless.

[(Anonymous)]

OP

Ahaha it gets worse my friend! I know the English fandom is like pretty nonexistent (despite the manga actually having a really good localization) but I have a few friends in the Japanese fandom, where this series is loved a bit more as a shoujo/proto BL staple, and here's the scoop on why Ash died:

The mangaka based his appearance on River Phoenix (I may have the wrong dead guy, but I'm 99% sure it's River), and once River died that's what pushed her to seriously think about killing off Ash. Apparently this wasn't what she originally intended to do with the series, which makes a lot of sense when you compare the stupid way Ash died with the kind of scrapes he got out of earlier.

[(Anonymous)]

different anon

SPOILERS

WHAAAAAAAAAT? I had no idea this is why Ash got killed. When I first read the series, I thought that Ash getting stabbed outside a public library was sort of anticlimactic (and not in the good way?) with all the constant awareness of his surroundings and all the death escaping he had done.

I think I first read BF back in one of the American manga magazines (Animerica Extra?) and liked it enough that I started buying it. It's one of the few series I went to the effort of collecting the released English versions of (liked it enough, plus good translation, and art unflipped) and I'm so glad I have all of it now that it's out of print.

[(Anonymous)]

AYRT

Yep. It's pretty well known in the more hardcore BF fandom that this is the reason. The mangaka was a huge fan of River Phoenix and had even joked that he would be the perfect actor to play him in a movie if one were to ever be made. When River died the mangaka kind of....went off the deep end and tied to the two together symbolically that way. That's why the ending reads so damn, as you put it, "anticlimactic". It reads like an OOC fantasy because that's basically what it is, Ash giving up all form of street smarts just long enough to get shanked and then do precisely nothing about it except write a letter and torture Eiji with his ghostly presence forever more.

I actually started reading it on a whim. Way back when I started collecting manga and anime one of the only suppliers in the West we had was this small, bimonthly zine that would come with pictures and a short description of each manga or anime (2 episodes for $29.99, 1 manga volume for $15.99-20.99), and you had to order out of that. My only two enduring loves from that period are Banana Fish and Kyuuketsuki Hime Miyu, which came out at the tail end of the zine's run and still hasn't been fully translated into English because the company doing it (IronCat) went under.

[(Anonymous)]

ayrt

Well, that just makes it absurdly easy to ignore the ending then, lol. I'm gonna play the 'ignoring canon' card HARD, since it seems to be a case of the story suffering due to outside influences.

[luxshine]

Yeah, it was River Phoenix. Apparently, the mangaka was a big fan and thought about him for the role of Ash if the manga was ever made into a movie.

[(Anonymous)]

OP

Thank you, glad I remembered correctly. And yep, the mangaka was a big fan and decided to kind of...weirdly tie the character and the manga together, which ended up with the manga suffering because of it.

[luxshine]

Yeah.

I half remember an interview I read with her where she mentioned that she was struck with the pointlessness of River's death, so she wanted to reflect that, but all I could think of then (and even now, when I reread the series) is that the story makes absolutely no sense with him dying.

I think the original ending she had planned had Ash going to meet Eiji at the airport, but I can't find a source for that (it is my head canon though. I am a queen of denial when it comes to BF)