EXCITING REACTIONS! REACTIVE EXCITEMENT!

Because few things in life can possibly be more exciting than an essay in which I revise some old terms.

I was never quite satisfied with the terms I devised in 2020 and 2021 for the basic oppositional setup of the roles of protagonist and antagonist, which are fundamentally integral to all narrative. I started out with a three-part series, starting here, in which I used the terms "challenger" and "defender." Later I sought to substitute "aggressor" for "challenger," but I never found myself using any of the terms on a regular basis. From experience, this indicates that I'm not fully comfortable with a given term or set of terms, because when I am comfortable, I start interweaving new and old on a regular basis, as can be seen with all the stuff I've been doing lately with "eminence."

It hit me that I needed terms that were more neutral in terms of moral nature, since some icons have no morality as such. This line of thought led me back to the beginnings of life, at least as conceived by Ernst Cassirer:      

Every organism, even the lowest... [possesses] a receptor system and an effector system... The receptor system by which a biological species receives outward stimuli and the effector system by which it reacts to them are in all cases closely interwoven...

This struck me as so basic to the fundament of all life that I wanted my new terms to reflect this process in lit-crit terms, and this led me to two terms, most often used in chemistry. From Merriam-Webster: 

EXCITANT: tending to excite or stimulate

REACTANT: a substance that enters into and is altered in the course of a chemical reaction   

Examples time:

In the original debut-film of GODZILLA, the sulky saurian rises from the depths, and whether he's out to trash Modern Japan for its sins or is just looking for old feeding-grounds, he parallels the stimulus, the excitant, that hits an organism's receptor-system-- said organism being Japan. Japan then takes the role of "reactant," marshaling the energies of its "effector system" to protect itself. As in many monster-movies, not least those devoted to Rodan and Mothra, the excitant, the thing that shakes up the status quo, is the Prime icon.

Godzilla becomes one of an ensemble of three Prime icons in GHIDORAH THE THREE-HEADED MONSTER, but this time, all of them are reactants. The titular Ghidorah provides the excitant, invading Earth and threatening its destruction. Humankind can do nothing to stop Ghidorah, but some humans are able to intercede with the fundamentally beneficent Mothra, and she attempts to enlist Godzilla and Rodan into defending the Earth. Though the scene of the "monster-conversation" might be one of the looniest things ever in a giant monster film, it still culminates in the three rampaging titans joining together like a Jurassic Justice League to stomp three-headed butt. This time the three former excitants become reactants, but they're still the Prime icons here.

Things get more complicated in those situations where excitant and reactant share the Prime spotlight, rare though it is. In KING KONG VS GODZILLA, the Big G still doesn't quite have the moxie to get first billing. But as in his previous two films, he functions as the excitant. Now, having said that. KKVG was not the first of Tojo Picture's "monster duel" films. That was GODZILLA RAIDS AGAIN-- but in that film, Godzilla is faced with two separate reactants: the humans with their guns and tanks, and another colossal critter, Angilas. Both Angilas and all of the humans are Sub antagonists to Prime Godzilla. Angilas was probably created only because it was cheaper to film a battle between two men in rubber suits than to have Godzilla stomp all over Tokyo again. But Kong had more stature than Godzilla, and so he, the "reactant," gets an arc as developed as that of the "excitant." Though Kong is originally brought to Japan for the same reason an American entrepreneur takes his first iteration to New York, his desire to pick a fight with the big reptile ends up making his interests converge with those of humanity, who make Kong into their unwitting catspaw. Despite the role of the humans in arranging the battle of the two Primes, they remain Sub icons only.        

The sort of human string-pulling seen in both KKVG and GHIDORAH is not strictly necessary, though. THE WAR OF THE GARGANTUAS concerns two brother-monsters-- one that seeks to avoid conflict and only feeds on fish, another who feeds on humans. This leads to human armies seeking to exterminate both giant beasts, but even if no humans appeared in the story, the main conflict would still be between "excitant" Gaira and "reactant" Sanda, who comprise the Prime icons of the narrative.   

More examples to come, as they occur to me.

      

MIKAMI MEDITATIONS PT. 6

 In the first MIKAMI MEDITATIONS, I hadn't read the full corpus of the 1991-99 GHOST SWEEPER MIKAMI manga, so I followed the only available information source for a particular datum: the age of the female lead Reiko Mikami. Wiki claimed that Mikami was 31 years old, but I never saw anything in the original manga that even came close to confirming that inaccurate info. However, upon re-reading one of the later arcs, "Relentless War," Mikami's age is decisively stated-- at least. as decisively as anything else that appears in an amateur online translation, the only source for the SWEEPER stories in English.

So there's no question that Mikami is 20 years old, only three years older than her high-schooler colleague Tadao Yokoshima. His age of seventeen is frequently repeated, and maybe artist Takashi Shiina felt he had to keep reminding readers of Yokoshima's status, since he spends so little time in school. There's some degree of change in the characters' attitudes and circumstances during the span of the series, but SWEEPER is a static series timewise, so no one really ages. In an early story, Mikami tells Okinu that she considers herself a "mature woman" and her ardent suitor Yokoshima to be a "brat." Mikami also avers that the student needs another ten years to catch up with her, which might have impressed me as her admitting to considerably more years than twenty. And then there are a couple of late stories where Yokoshima insults Mikami by calling her an "old hag," which certainly sounds odd if only three years separate them. 

However, I am aware of one other manga, ZERO'S FAMILIAR, in which a teenager calls a woman of only twenty-three years an "old woman." So there's some probability that this was a familiar type of joke in Japanese culture, a slam meant to be aggravating but not technically accurate.

Had I thought about it, an early story, "Love Needs Its Time," shows that Shiina always had a loose sense that Mikami and Yokoshima aren't far apart in age. At the conclusion of "Time," Yokoshima flashes back in time to when he was a baby, and a very young Mikami, possibly just three years old, encounters him.

  Mikami's age puts an interesting spin on the first time Shiiina depicts Mikami and Yokoshima meeting as relatively mature entities, in a sequence from the arc "The Right Stuff."

              

The main point of the flashback is to regale readers with how the Mikami/Yokoshima relationship got set in stone from the start: the lust-monkey makes some foolish pass at his boss and she beats the hell out of him. However, the flashback is more important for offering a deeper motivation for Mikami to hire the high-schooler. As I've said before, if she was truly repulsed by Yokoshima's advances, Mikami would just fire him and look for another cheap employee to do her heavy lifting. 

The internal chronology of "The Right Stuff" also mentions that Mikami's mother Michie died (or rather, faked her death) five years previous to the "static time" of the ongoing series, which would make Mikami fifteen at the time. One presumes she finished both high school and her training as a ghost sweeper under her sensei, so she's about twenty when she opens her agency. Clearly she wants to be an independent businesswoman, and she appears to have no romance in her life. The only time Shiina showed her evincing any interest in romantic life was when Mikami was ten years old and crushed on the older Saijou. Yet he had only filial feelings for her, and thus one may assume that, for all intents and purposes, Mikami's turned her back on romance at this crucial time in her life. 

Mikami wants to carry on her mother's profession of ghost-sweeping, but for reasons I've discussed elsewhere, she also intends to make a lot of money from it. She's aware of her phenomenal looks but views them only as assets in attracting a customer base. She may not be totally immune to flattery, though, since after scorning Yokoshima's clumsy come-on, she responds to his verbal praise with the interesting sentence, "Since you're so honest, I'll forget about that [attempted assault] from before." In other words, before Yokoshima has said anything about being willing to work for cheap, Mikami unfreezes a bit at his compliments. She starts unburdening herself as to how she thought she'd hire a good-looking guy to help sell her image to customers, but she was afraid she'd have to pay a lot of money for such an assistant, which would cut into potential profits. Yokoshima knows he's not good-looking, but he's so besotted with Mikami that he offers to do her dirty jobs for a pittance. However, in practice, Yokoshima does gain some additional remuneration whenever he peeps on his boss in the shower, and she brings this up frequently-- though again, it doesn't bother her enough to make her sack him. But does she keep Yokoshima around purely because she saves money by employing such a doofus to do all her hard work? She almost certainly enjoys holding on to her money and may even get some sadistic satisfaction at beating him down when he propositions her, apparently wanting to keep her virginity as much as a big bank account.                 

Yet Shiina almost certainly knew the persuasive power of the "hot girl falls for homely guy" trope, so as early as the Volume Four arc "Dad's Here," Okinu suspects that Mikami harbors tender feelings for Yokoshima despite his considerable demerits. Yet Shiina waits until the late arc "Right Stuff" to depict the original dynamic that prevailed when the sexy exorcist met her stooge-- and that flashback takes place during a real-time story in which Yokoshima has harnessed his psychic powers to a level that almost surpasses Mikami's abilities.

Yet Shiina was careful not to undermine the comical tension, so Yokoshima never transcends his "stooge-self" and Mikami always remains the harsh mistress. The capstone story to the entire series, "Break Your Destiny," shows Mikami as a true tsundere, unable to dispense love without putting her potential paramour through the wringer to make sure of his devotion. The two of them being closer in age, though, makes it seem as though their perverse relationship came about in the same period of life wherein more normative couples usually date and get married for the first time. That makes it more likely, at least for proponents of the "hot girl/homely guy" trope, that this fractious couple will be able to unite at some future date as well.          

MONSTERS VS. VILLAINS

 Though I've made distinctions elsewhere on the blog as to the theoretical nature of monsters and villains in terms of the goal-affects "persistence" and "glory," here I'll confine myself to one quick observation, building off the following quote:

"Why, this fellow seems to take a diabolical--I might almost say pathological-- pleasure in crimes of violence, revenge, avarice and self- protection. Sometimes it seems as if he delights in the pure deviltry of the thing. It is weird."

The "fellow" in question will later be revealed as The Clutching Hand, a nemesis to Arthur B. Reeve's hero Craig Kennedy in both the 1914 silent serial THE EXPLOITS OF ELAINE and the identically-titled movie novelization (which ran in 1914 magazines to promote the serial). Though Reeve was the sole creator of Craig Kennedy, in all likelihood he was a hired gun in working on the serial, whose narrative would have been controlled by the producers, principally George B. Seitz, also a director and writer on the serial. The Clutching Hand may not be the first costumed villain in literary history, but he has been credited as being the first in narrative cinema, for whatever that's worth.

The full serial is not extant, but the Reeve novel is. I haven't yet decided to read the book online, but that opening line struck me as very indicative of the appeal of villains. While there are villains who have tragic backstories, they're usually not as tragically-oriented as monsters. One thinks of the Frankenstein Monster arising, a tabula rasa in a grotesque form, only to find himself an instant pariah, or the Browning version of Dracula, vaguely yearning for a proper death. Stoker's Dracula is more the cold-hearted plotter, but I see in him none of the glorious elan one sees in super-villains like the Hand. Dracula doesn't leave mocking notes about his lawbreaking ways, much like a later breed of villain who obligingly leave clues to their virtuous opponents. Not dissimilarly, Fu Manchu has his own way of "signing" his murders, and in the first novel Nayland Smith remarks on how Fu won't lower himself to use mundane weapons but always has to use more exotic devices.

More on these matters as they occur to me.                   

THE READING RHEUM: THE SLEEPING SORCERESS (1972)

 

SLEEPING SORCERESS was the second of the Lancer paperbacks to spotlight novel-length adventures of Elric. It's not nearly as well-composed as the first novel and is more transparently a fix-up of separate stories. All the stories here are, like the tale "The Singing Citadel" in the collection of the same name, are prequels to 1962's "The Stealer of Souls," in that they all concern Elric's conflicts with his first major enemy, the sorcerer Theleb K'aarna. The stories written from the 1960s and 1970s set the foundation of Moorcock's multiverse, but as he himself has commented, he was often making up things as he went along.   

Book One of SORCERESS, entitled "The Torment of the Last Lord," is the source of the image of a sleeping enchantress whom, one presumes, the hero will rescue-- though in the whole of the book, this is only true up to a point. Elric and his sidekick Moonglum have just left behind Queen Yishana in "Citadel" in order to pursue Ka'arna, and they encounter a castle inhabited only by the sleeping body of Empress Myshella, an ally of the Powers of Law, just as Elric is aligned to the powers of Chaos. Myshella instantly reminds Elric of his lost love Cymoril, whom he tried to rescue but slew instead, but despite those bad memories, he finds a magical means to revive her. Myshella wakes up just as Theleb K'aarna, allied to an army of Mongol-like warriors, marches on the castle to eliminate its potential threat to Chaos. Myshella summons forces that destroy the horde but K'aarna escapes. Not surprisingly, Myshella is instantly drawn to the brooding albino, and she soon becomes the newest in Elric's "Bond Girl" collection.

Book Two, "To Snare the Pale Prince," is a needlessly confusing sequel to the story "To Rescue Tanelorn" from CITADEL.  "Tanelorn" seems to take place after Elric meets Rackhir the Red Archer in the 1972 ELRIC novel before the latter has visited the mystical city of Tanelorn, while in the short story Rackhir resides in the city and protects it from a Chaos-inspired invasion by an army of beggars from the corrupt realm Nadsokor. Elric is referenced in "Tanelorn" but he does not appear-- and yet, "Prince" tells readers that Elric has visited Tanelorn at some previous time, and thus the albino and his buddy become allies with Rackhir's forces as they defend themselves from a new invasion. This time K'aarna allies himself with Urish, King of Nadsokor, who also has a previous grudge against Elric. The two villains conspire to steal a magic ring from Elric, knowing that he and Moonglum will come to Nadsokor to retrieve it. The evildoers also unleash a new invading force upon Tanelorn, a gaggle of demons who look like women and who therefore prove difficult for Tanelorn's defenders to strike down. Elric summons a troop of male demons, described as "ape-like," who destroy the female creatures and then die as well. ("Beauty and the Beast," anyone?) Elric recovers his ring and there's a rather pointless exchange with the hero's demon patron Arioch. K'aarna gets away again but this time his next foray against Tanelorn transpires not much longer afterward.

Book Three, "Three Heroes with a Single Aim," takes place during a period when Rackhir has invited Elric and Moonglum to abide in Tanelorn. The peace of the eternal city does nothing to dispel Elric's anomie, so he rides out into the wilderness, possibly hoping to die. Instead, he stumbles across K'aarna utilizing a mystic device to transport alien reptiles from another cosmos in order to attack Tanelorn. When Elric seeks to destroy the device, it hurls him into another dimension, which is the hero's first real encounter with the Moorcockian multiverse. He meets both Prince Corum of the "Swords trilogy," conceived around the same time, and Erekose, a character whom Moorcock loosely formulated in 1957 and then updated for a stand-alone novel in 1962, and they all realize, in some vague metaphysical manner, that they're all aspects of the same "eternal champion." I wrote up my impressions of "Heroes" in a previous post and my re-reading now does not alter my verdict:

Trouble is, while such heroes are interesting individually, they're not quite as interesting when they meet each other.  In the 1972 "novel" THE SLEEPING SORCERESS-- actually a collection of three separate novellas featuring Moorcock's most popular character, Elric of Melnibone-- the albino-skinned protagonist encounters two other heroes. Both are, like Elric, aspects of the "Eternal Champion," a sort of archetype that remains constant in many multiversal domains.  One is "Prince Corum," who had his own series of adventures around the same time as Elric. The other calls himself "Erekose," though he's not entirely identical with the character from the one-shot 1970 novel THE ETERNAL CHAMPION. For one thing, the Erekose-warrior in this story is explicitly black-skinned. I have not recently reread ETERNAL CHAMPION, but as I recall no reference is made to the race of the original Erekose. I assume Moorcock was having a bit of fun playing around with the racial identities of his heroes in different incarnations.

The crossover-novel brings the three heroes together in the equally eternal city Tanelorn, where they battle the magic of an evil sorcerer. It's a decent enough story but loses some punch given that all three heroes sound and act pretty much the same. Further, this sequence of SLEEPING SORCERESS was originally derived from a similar section in the 1971 Corum novel THE KING OF THE SWORDS. Since they're pretty much the same story, I decided to count the Elric version as "best crossover," simply because it stands upon its own better as a crossover-tale.  Further, it's a good basic representation of Moorcock's "Eternal Champion" concept, though perhaps not its most complex manifestation.

After Elric helps the other two heroes overcome an adversary in the other dimension-- a singularly underwhelming threat-- Elric returns to his own world and uses magic derived from the other dimension to thwart K'aarna's plot. Again, K'aarna gets away, as he must to satisfy the continuity. But the threat of Myshella must arguably greater. She has to perish because, if she's allowed to survive, she might tempt the hero away from his dolorous quest to slay lots of sorcerers and monsters before he dies. In the final analysis, there is enough symbolic discourse in all three chapters to justify my saying that its mythicity is high. But SORCERESS is not even close to being as aesthetically pleasing as ELRIC OF MELNIBONE.    

          

MYTHCOMICS: "BREAK YOUR DESTINY" GHOST SWEEPER MIKAMI (2011?)

 

"In essence, the domain of eroticism is the domain of violence, of violation"-- Bataille, EROTISM, p. 16.

"...in these comic circumstances, the beating may be deemed a symbolic displacement for the sex-act, since the female is almost always hot for the male."-- SHOOTING THE SHIRT, 2014. 

The title "Break Your Destiny" appears only on this splash page from the second part of the final SWEEPER story. Shiina's story, and those of other mangaka, were published in various magazines and in a 2013 collection, in order to generate revenue to be donated to the benefit of victims of a devastating 2011 Japanese earthquake. 

Any readers of the SWEEPER manga would have known that Tadao Yokoshima's "destiny" was to be the beloved butt-monkey of the phenomenal ghost sweeper Reiko Mikami, so author Takashi Shiina would have been having fun with that preconception by claiming that "this man's desire is going to change Japan's history." But the history of the Mikami-Yokoshima relationship ensures that none of the Japanese history-books must be changed, and despite the title Yokoshima finds that his destiny is locked in, and by his own free choice.

One element in the story suggests that this is supposed to be set in the early days of the Mikami-Yokoshima relationship: the fact that their colleague, the sweet-natured Okinu, is still a ghost. This state of affairs came to an end in the story-arc "Sleeping Beauty" (circa 1996), during which time Okinu was reincarnated in a mortal form. Okinu forgot her friends for a while, but when she remembered, she rejoined with "Mikami GS" for the remainder of the series in her purely mortal form. And yet, if this story were supposed to be taking place before "Beauty," that would create a continuity-problem, for reasons I'll explain shortly. Since Okinu's being a ghost is not important to the narrative, it's most likely that Shiina simply indulged in a little nostalgia with his friendly ghost-girl.  

  

The setup is only loosely established: Mikami has been hired to dispel a bunch of spirits from a deserted Japanese temple, and she demands that the holdouts inside the temple surrender to her authority, or she'll wipe them out. Okinu reminds Mikami that Yokoshima's being held hostage in the temple, and Mikami seems indifferent to her male assistant's fate, as long as she succeeds in her mission and gets paid. However, to herself Mikami muses, "I am really counting on your charm towards the supernatural, Yokoshima. It's one hell of a gamble whether she might fall for you or not." In other words, though Mikami unambiguously wants to earn her fee for ghost-sweeping, she's not just writing Yokoshima off, but is gambling that he will "charm" the head spirit somehow. (How Mikami knows it's a female spirit is left to the imagination.) But in the period prior to "Sleeping Beauty," Yokoshima-- never a Don Juan at the best of times-- had not demonstrated any special "charm towards the supernatural." It's only in the later adventures that Yokoshima attracts two or three "supernatural girls" into his orbit, and that's what Shiina's thinking of when he, speaking through Mikami, credits Yokoshima with "charm."

Yokoshima, however, was not apprised of Mikami's opinion of his charms, so he's in turmoil at having been deserted. However, the head spirit-- Seiryuto, an analogue to a character from another Shiina manga-- offers Yokoshima a deal. If Yokoshima supplies her with supernatural power, Seiryuto will whisk him back in time to an era where he can become the ruler of Japan and can have access to all the women in the world. Yokoshima agrees, and Seiryuto transforms her temple into a time-traveling spaceship. 

Mikami and Okinu witness the ship take off, and hear Yokoshima bid farewell to them, and to Mikami's "boobs, ass, and thighs." Though Mikami doesn't know what's going on, she demonstrates that she's not as willing to let her assistant disappear as she suggested earlier. She uses a wirepoon gun to fasten a line to the ship, so that it hauls Mikami and Okinu along in its wake. Thus the two intrepid heroines travel in time as well and end up receiving exposition from none other than the famed warlord Nobunaga Oda. This could be deemed a quasi-crossover in that Shiina's next manga after SWEEPER was a fictionalized series about Oda in his teenaged years.

One thing the girls learn from Oda is that they didn't end up in the same period as Yokoshima. He appeared in medieval Japan half a year ago and began using Seiryuto's advanced weaponry to conquer the local lords. From Mikami, Oda finds out how the greedy exorcist offended her assistant, and Oda has a suggestion on how to fix the situation so that Mikami and Okinu can take their buddy back to their time: Mikami must apologize to Yokoshima. The 16th-century warlord shows a remarkable knowledge of the 21st-century term "tsundere," advising the heroine that it's not good to "be too much tsun and no dere." Against her instincts, Mikami tries to practice apologizing, but Oda informs her that she looks like "a complete villain." Oda, knowing that her attitude will never compel Yokoshima to give in, formulates an alternative plan.

Sometime later, Oda's army marches on Yokoshima's lands. Yokoshima doesn't care about fighting Oda, for he's surrounded by the beautiful women of his court. But Seiryuto won't let him canoodle with the hotties, because Yokoshima can only endow her with his supernatural power as long as his lust is not satisfied. Presumably the alien yokai has been blocking Yokoshima for the past months for that very reason, since he's just as desperate for sex as he was working for Mikami. Yokoshima doesn't want to confront Mikami on the field of battle, but the court ladies affirm that they won't give him nookie if he has no temporal power. Boxed in by his Faustian bargain with the alien, Yokoshima dons his armor and joins his army in the field.

Oda's alternate plan was to still have Mikami apologize to Yokoshima, but with a mask over her face to conceal her insincerity. But headstrong Mikami pursues her own destiny, and dons the horrendous mask of an oni, which just stokes Yokoshima's fear of her. Despite her mixed signals, Mikami makes a sincere (for her) effort to apologize, but her need for absolute control causes her to deny her apology seconds after making it. Yokoshima is unable to follow Seiryuto's counsel and convert his fear into anger, but his fear of Mikami's vengeance drives him to attack her with his sword. She mostly blocks his blow, but he hits her mask and it splits. Seiryuto is then surprised at the disappearance of her power-source, for even though Mikami maintains through her words that she doesn't need her assistant in any way, her "crying eyes" belie her lying words. For some vague reason, Seiryuto's loss of power propels her and the three ghost-sweepers out of the medieval era.

And what is the reward for Yokoshima's virtue, his realization of how important Mikami is to him, and he to her? Why, his reward is vice-- the vice of Mikami's wrath. But going on all evidence, she's insincere again in saying that she's punishing him for having physically attacked her. Mikami resents that Yokoshima pushed her into losing her prized self-control, not to mention any anger she might feel at his willingness to leave her. Seiryuto builds on Oda's tsundere comment by claiming that Mikami is "99.9999 percent tsun"-- which is another way of saying that Mikami has no dere to spare. Okinu tries to see the sunny side of torture by saying, "Well, but at least their hearts are connected-- I think." 

And yet Mikami does speak a truth of sorts in her final adventure-- one that makes the most sense if she utters it after she and her butt-monkey have endured all the travails of the 1991-99 series. In some of those adventures, Mikami became hazily aware that she's conceived a liking for Yokoshima, but she would never verbally admit it in his presence. But this last time, when he protests that she ought to show him "some grade of affection" after he chose her over rulership of Japan, Control-Freak Mikami makes the admission, "This is how I show affection! Through my whip of love!" 

Such a confession is entirely in line with a female who became obsessed with control after she failed to hold the attention of the men in her youth with traditional female traits. The final words of Mikami explain why she didn't fire the horny teen who kept ogling and molesting her, and it certainly was not because Yokoshima worked cheap. It's because he's so besotted with her beauty that he'll endure any rigor, any torture, to be near her-- and his passion transforms her into the perfect domme for such an intrinsic sub. As with many similar figures from Japanese pop culture, her violence becomes a "symbolic displacement for the sex-act." But at least Takashi Shiina offered some "grade of affection" for his character Yokoshima in the story "Stranger Than Paradise," in which it's revealed that (maybe) Yokoshima and Mikami eventually tie the knot-- though even holy matrimony is not enough to resolve all the conflicts in this equally sacred "battle of the sexes."

                         

              

TSUNDERE, TSUNDERE

 (Apologies for the above pun to Blur and their nineties song, "Sunday, Sunday")

On this blog I've written quite a bit about the appearance of sadistic tendencies in various fictional characters, particularly of the feminine gender, who as a group are better known for "giving" than for "taking." Jordan Peterson has noted that females are generally more "agreeable" than males and less given to overt confrontation. Yet I think there are often currents of aggression that become intermingled with the most agreeable temperaments, and one might say that many of these have, in Japanese culture, manifested in what has been termed the "tsundere"-- the understanding of which is crucial to my impending conclusion to my ongoing GHOST SWEEPER MIKAMI analysis.  

So what's a tsundere? Grokipedia and Wikipedia agree on this basic definition:    

A tsundere (ツンデレ) is a character archetype originating in Japanese anime, manga, and visual novels, depicting an individual who initially behaves in a cold, hostile, or irritable manner—known as the "tsun" phase—before gradually revealing a softer, more affectionate and vulnerable side, referred to as the "dere" phase.

Grokipedia also adds a categorization I don't find in the Wiki essay:

The archetype has evolved to include variations, such as "Type A" (harsh exterior dominating initially) and "Type B" (affectionate by default but with tsun outbursts)

I for one have only seen the tsundere term used for Type A: the sort of character who projects hostility or indifference, whether to many people or to one specific person. I can see at least a chain of logic for Type B, though, and I can also see how readers of manga, and of fiction generally, will particularly have a tendency to use the term interchangeably for (a) those that project an aggressive vibe but have some level of agreeability hidden beneath a tough exterior, and (b) those that project an agreeable temperament but also evince aspects of aggression on occasion. Neither Type A nor Type B are intrinsically feminine character-types, and indeed I can think of prominent male archetypes along roughly the same lines. However, in this essay I'll confine myself to feminine examples, because traditionally aggression becomes more problematic, psychologically and socially, for females than for males.

Grok and Wiki also agree that the term "tsundere" was not coined until the very early years of the 21st century, though there had been several fictional progenitors of both types. Takashi Shiina's Reiko Mikami is unquestionably a member of Type A, and if the online translation of Mikami's final story, circa 2003, is an accurate one, that story might be among the first mangas to incorporate the newbie term. Rumiko Takahashi's Lum is sometimes labeled as a Type A as well, though I deem her a Type B based on the above description. But Lum may be the first major manga-female who intermingled agreeability and aggression so thoroughly that she's often deemed the first of the type, though she appeared over 20 years before the term was coined.

              

Shiina's indebtedness to Takahashi has been mentioned in online interviews with the two of them and is played for laughs in one of the late SWEEPER stories, "GS Mikami 78." This tale depicts a demon-battle in the career of Mikami's youthful mother Michie and includes a cute in-joke wherein young Rumiko Takahashi witnesses the fight and is inspired to create URUSEI YATSURA. Shiina is very careful to make sure his readers know that the joke has Takahashi's approval. That said, Michie is a closer analogue to Lum than Mikami is, and the "GS 78" arc even shows Michie winning over a reluctant male lover with her passion-- a thing Lum repeatedly seeks to do with Ataru, though with far less success.

Actually, in her very first appearance Lum does have some strong character-traits in common with Mikami. When an alien race, strongly resembling the traditional Japanese ogres called "oni," makes contact with Earth, the ETs offer a deal: they will withhold plans to conquer Earth if a randomly chosen Earthman engages their champion in a game of "oni-tag." Lum is the champion, and she's totally okay with helping her people conquer an unoffending planet. Earth's champion can only win the contest if he tags Lum's horns, but her ability to fly makes that difficult. Ataru only earns Lum's wrath-- her "tsun" characteristics-- when he manages to pull off her bikini-top, which might be viewed as a deflected defloration motif. Lum then begins fighting Ataru on a personal level, the female responding to the male's crude advances, and she even sneers at his lack of toughness when he's knocked out by a fall to the ground. However, the moment Ataru defeats Lum, this time using her stolen bikini as bait, Lum shifts into the "dere" phase, and for the rest of the series she tries to convince Ataru to marry her willingly-- which is precisely where Lum's resemblance to Reiko Mikami ends. 

One assumes that on some level the Lum character knows she's not really Ataru's wife until they have the ceremony, but she reacts to his dalliances with other women as if he were a cheating husband. This leads to the series' most familiar trope: Lum violently punishing Ataru for his fickleness. In this she's certainly a revenge-figure for every woman who dealt with a trifling male, even though the comedy stems from both (a) the fact that she doesn't have any literal claim on Ataru, and (b) the fact that, if only because of their propinquity, Ataru does come to love Lum better than any other appealing woman-- though, much like Shiina's perpetual victim Yokoshima, Ataru always wants as many women as the world offers. But Lum generally projects an agreeable "Type B" personality no matter how many times she's moved to violence.

Shiina's final SWEEPER story appeared in or around 2011, the year that a great earthquake devastated Japan, prompting several manga-artists to contribute special stories .to generate revenue for victims. Possibly, had the earthquake never taken place, Shiina still might have found some other reason to present this capstone to his original series, which had concluded in 1999. The cover highlights Mikami's comeback by mentioning that Shiina's profit-seeking ghostbuster had "arrived in the 21st century"--though thus far this two-part tale has remained the last hurrah for Mikami and her crew. It does show that by 2011 the term "tsundere" has become accepted by manga-practitioners, enough that Shiina expects his audience to understand the context. And in the final SWEEPER story, Shiina pokes a little fun at how the term's meaning might, or might not, apply to so extreme a personality as Ghost Sweeper Reiko Mikami.

               

MIKAMI MEDITATIONS PT. 5

 To cut to the chase, my answer to the question "why is heroic Reiko Mikami such a greedhead sadist" boils down to compensation for daddy issues. 

Given how little information artist Takashi Shiina offers about Mikami's developmental years, it's likely that he never meant to lay bare his character's soul. Though he wasn't unique in concocting a shonen heroine with both positive and negative traits, Shiina may not have wanted to kill his golden goose by dissecting its innards. But that doesn't mean he didn't contrive a working psychological concept of his heroine.  

Mikami's passion for the ghost sweeping profession is first highlighted in the arc "Message from Mother," in a flashback showing Little Reiko with her mother Michie. In present times, though, Adult Mikami believes that her mother has died some years back. Thus it's a considerable shock when Michie time-travels to Adult Mikami's era to ask Mikami and her team to guard over Mikami's younger self, Little Reiko. Then Michie disappears, and Mikami mentions that she was in middle school when Michie died. Mikami tries to contact her still living father Kimihiko Mikami, but he's out of the country, and the incident only reveals to the reader the existence of some emotional rift between daughter and father. Then Mikami and her allies must confront a demon trying to kill Little Reiko for reasons that remain somewhat obscure by the story's end. In any case, Michie returns, so that mother and daughter vanquish the demon, after which Michie and Little Reiko return to their own time.

Shiina later follows up with an arc named "Someday, Somewhere." Though nothing much has been said about Mikami possessing the same time-travel power as her mother, both Mikami and Yokoshima experience premonitory dreams about Mikami's mother. Then a convenient "accident" propels both of them through time back to Japan's medieval era. During a battle with a demon, Yokoshima is killed, and a rage-filled Mikami attacks the demon. However, the fiend hits her with lightning, and this triggers her power, bumping her back a few minutes, so that she's able to save Yokoshima and defeat her enemy. They then return to the 20th century, and the story ends just before "The Man Who Can Summon a Storm." 

Having seen Yokoshima perish doesn't make Mikami any more generous to him, but in "Storm," she does soften when she encounters her childhood crush Saijou. Michie Mikami is still alive at this time, but though we don't know anything about ten-year-old Reiko's relationship with her still unseen father, a much later story will establish that Kimihiko's an absentee father. There's no way to prove that Shiina had fully planned out his intentions with Kimihiko, but on the hypothesis that he always had something sketched out, then Ten-Year-Old Reiko could be compensating for an inattentive father by crushing on an older, and not much less inappropriate, male figure. The conclusion of "Storm," however, suggests that Mikami has become totally invested in making money as self-validation, as opposed to Saijou's selfless altruism.  

I've stated that the earliest "internal chronology" mention of Mikami's fierce desire to make money appeared in an early story, where a middle-school-aged Mikami finds herself at odds with her sensei's desire to exorcise demons without making any profit. This early tale, "Love Needs Its Time," doesn't mention either of Mikami's parents, but it would be interesting to speculate that by this time Michie has passed (or rather, Mikami believes that she's dead). In such circumstances, even a middle-school-aged girl might have needed her father, and if he was still unavailable, that might have caused Mikami to believe that she was totally on her own as a ghost sweeper. Thus the desire to amass wealth becomes the lady exorcist's sole source of validation, which is why in "Storm" she goes catatonic from stress after trying to pursue Saijou's altruistic standards. 

Several episodes later, the arc "Death Zone" starts off with Mikami diverging from her usual habit of disparaging her junior assistant, by showing appreciation of his efforts with a salary increase. That it makes her uncomfortable to think about treating Yokoshima as a human being, rather than as a tool for her profit, is significant. Then another time-travel trip to medieval Japan ensues. Mikami and Yokoshima encounter their "reincarnation ancestors," respectively a demoness named Mephisto and a young exorcist of the medieval era. This is followed, after various interceding arcs, by the previously discussed "Mom's Here," which goes even further in demolishing Mikami's assurance that she won't ever succumb to Yokoshima's dubious charms. 

"Zone" loosely sets up a later series of arcs, over 60 episodes in number, that pits Mikami against Ashtaroth, the "Big Bad" of her entire series. In the arc "Merciless War," Ashtaroth, a demon obsessed with destroying humanity, sends three emissaries to launch hostilities, demonesses whom he spawned, much the same way he earlier spawned Mephisto, Mikami's "reincarnation ancestor." In the arc "The Longest Day," Ashtaroth seeks to subvert Mikami's will by speaking to her as if she were his daughter, making him the first real Mikami "father figure" the readers have seen "on-panel." Little does Ashtaroth know that Mikami is already somewhat father-alienated, so she head-butts him. Unwittingly, Ashtaroth scores more of a point against Mikami in that one of his new "daughters," Luciola, falls in love with Yokoshima. Luciola becomes Mikami's first real rival for Yokoshima's affections, and this state of affairs will eventually lead to Luciola's extinction.

It's in one of these "endless arcs" that Mikami's time-traveling mother Michie returns, taking command of the operation to defeat Ashtaroth. Not till the end of the 60-something episodes does Mikami learn the truth: her mother actually did not die during Mikami's middle-school years but has remained in hiding ever since faking her death. Why? Frankly, I didn't follow the author's logic, but it does make one wonder if Mikami didn't get her manipulative streak from her mother.

Only in a very late sequence did the readers finally encounter Mikami's actual mortal father Kimihiko Mikami-- but in flashback for the most part. Mikami seeks out her trainer Father Karasu and he relates to her, and other members of the Mikami posse, the story of how Michie and Kimihiko met, fell in love and got married. In many ways Kimihiko is the opposite of Yokoshima. Kimihiko possesses a freakish level of super-telepathy, a talent which he cannot control and which causes him to read people's minds and know all their secrets. In fact, after the spirited Michie proposes to him, Kimihiko tries to run away from her, but she tracks him down and compels him, with the intensity of her affection, to marry her. Nevertheless, Kimihiko remains aloof from his daughter throughout her childhood for fear of having a bad effect on her due to his telepathic influence. Ultimately, adult Mikami is able to transcend the disappointments of her childhood, by promising her father-- seen only from a distance-- to mend fences.

That's the last word of the series on fatherhood, both from Mikami's true father Kimihiko and from her "false father" Ashtaroth. Mikami's greediness doesn't play a big role in either of these scenarios, so my critical analysis remains only a weak correlation, since Shiina does not expressly connect Mikami's greed to her paternal issues. Further, by the technical end of the series-- not counting the "earthquake relief" story Shiina produced in 2011, which I'll address in my next essay-- Mikami is still expousing her gospel of profit. 

The story *appears* to commence in the far future, when Mikami, Yokoshima and Okinu have all died, leaving behind their spirits, or possibly just approximations of themselves, to haunt their old agency-building in year 2199. Two modern ghostbusters, a robot and a cyborg, intrude on the "ghosts" not to send them to paradise but to capture their spirits for profit-- but Mikami's superior GS skill defeats her enemies. 

Then Mikami and Yokoshima wake up in present times, having experienced the same futuristic dream. They and their colleague Okinu are then drawn into yet another of many battles with supernatural foes, and Mikami's last words are her motto, "Present profit comes first." The connotation I take from this is that even though Mikami sometimes looks gauche or foolish for wanting money so much, at base her desire for profit is an excuse, a motivation to drive herself to heights of excellence in ghost-sweeping. Her wish to emulate her mother may have engendered that ideal, but there's a reality of running a business that goes with that idealism, and the conclusion suggests that Mikami has reached a perfect balance between idealism and realism. To be sure, the final stories in the series don't provide closure for the 1991-99 series with regard to the Mikami-Yokoshima bond. But the "really final" 2011 story does provide the best of all possible conclusions to GHOST SWEEPER MIKAMI.