I SENPAI AND THOU NAGATORO PT. 2

 By the time of installments 22 and 23-- which I'll give the collective title of "Senpai, Let's Go to the Beach"-- the Naoto-Nagatoro relationship has settled into a rough routine. Naoto tries to remain aloof, and Nagatoro tries to pull him out of his shell. In this project she receives some ambivalent help from her girl-buddies Gamo and Yoshi, who also find Naoto amusing, though they're also entertained by Nagatoro's increasingly evident affection for her "victim."

So the foursome's trek to the beach to escape summer heat begins with the three girls mocking Naoto as usual. 

But being at the beach also highlights some sexual aspects overshadowed at high school, which involve Nagatoro seeking to get her share of "the male gaze" from Naoto.

Despite this exposure to nubile female flesh, Naoto refuses to gambol in the waves with the girls, remaining on shore. However, after a while Nagatoro can't resist ringing his chimes again. And in truth, Naoto hasn't totally distanced himself from the possibility of innocent fun, for Nagatoro soon learns that he's wearing swim trunks despite having claimed no desire to go swimming. 

Up to this point, despite having teased Naoto as an "it" (specifically, a sea louse), she's clearly trying to relate to him as a "thou" (a fellow being who needs to get out of his own way). But Naoto still plays hard to get. Nagatoro wants to apply sunscreen to his pale skin so he'll have no excuse to stay on the beach, and Naoto comes up with the excuse that only "lovers" rub lotion on each other's bodies.

This results in an extraordinary sequence. Since Naoto rejects her "thou" offer, Nagatoro rather easily slips back into "it" mode. Since the young student claims that he doesn't want to get lotion administered via her hands, she squirts some on him and then begins rubbing it in with her foot. Author Nanashi does not stint on showing that Nagatoro is clearly stimulated by making Naoto her footstool, and he doesn't show any desire to resist her rough ministrations. However, when her two friends try to join in, rationality asserts itself, and she tries to make them desist. 

Despite this display of teenage hormones, Naoto is fully slicked down with SPF, and he allows himself to join the girls at their seaside games. And the episode ends with Naoto admitting to himself that he enjoyed the idyll at the beach, even with all the teasing involved. With episode 24, Naoto will begin thinking that he shouldn't let Nagatoro take the initiative in their strange relationship all the time-- which becomes an important trope for the remainder of the series.

I SENPAI AND THOU NAGATORO PT. 1

I AND THOU, first published in 1923 (though it became a college favorite in the 1960s), was written by a philosopher who had renounced the practice of the Rabbinic tradition but nevertheless incorporated that tradition into his philosophy.  I AND THOU, rather than offering a series of reasoned arguments, puts forth a concatenation of incantatory meditations, centered upon Buber’s two schemas of human relationship: the “I-thou” and the “I-it”... Buber calls his two schemas “word pairs.”  By this he meant that even though he was well aware that all three words—“I,” “thou,” and “it”—were independent words, he believed that in terms of human relation it was impossible that any “I” could exist apart from its relationship to other phenomena.  Only two relationships were conceivable to Buber: either one's "I" related to a "thou" or an "it."   Thus he regards his two schemas as “word pairs” that are existentially insoluble. -- PERSONAS OF GRATIFICATION.

I should get some sort of points for originality, for I hypothesize that I'm the only NAGATORO fan who would seek to gloss the appeal of a 21st century Japanese teen humor comic by referencing a 1920s Jewish philosopher. Yet for me, the key to NAGATORO's uniqueness lies in the process by which the character of Naoto, or "Senpai," goes from being an "it" to a "thou" in the eyes of the titular girl-bully.

For many if not all translations, the full title of the manga is PLEASE DON'T BULLY ME, NAGATORO, and I strongly suspect that the commercial translation ditched the word "bully" lest anyone think that the publishers were advocating the practice of bullying, particularly in the context of high-school student interaction. Yet understanding the dynamic of bully and victim is important to seeing how the relationship of the two main characters evolves.

In the first installment of the series proper, the reader knows little about either Naoto or Nagatoro except that he's a bookish-looking second-year high schooler, while she is a mischievous first-year student who's seen doing one athletic feat, doing a kung-fu high kick. But despite being younger than Naoto, Nagatoro instantly assumes a dominant attitude. Not for over a hundred episodes will readers learn what caused Nagatoro to pick on Naoto, whose name she never uses in the entirety of the series. But in the first episodes, the reader is given to understand that "Senpai" is an "it" to the young girl, a subject for inordinate mockery. 

Not much changes in the second installment. Nagatoro, having tormented Naoto so much that he breaks down in tears for the first time in his experience, beards him in the young fellow's lair: a school "art club" of which Naoto is the only active member. On the pretext of apologizing for the previous day, Nagatoro insists on providing the artist with a model, though he expresses no desire for one. Because Naoto has been so cut off from interactions with his peers, he can't draw an attractive female sitting right in front of him, and so she mocks his lack of sexual experience (though technically Nagatoro is no more experienced; she just talks a good game). Naoto breaks up again, and to add to his humiliation, he can't even shield his face because she's able to pry his arms apart.

The third installment, however, shows the first movement away from Nagatoro being in an "I-it" relationship with Naoto. A genuine bully is only too happy to continue treating his or her victim as a thing to suffer torment, and jock-bullies are notorious for believing that it's their privilege to dominate those who are weaker. Nagatoro's jock-credentials will be more firmly established in later stories, but after her third foray against Naoto's ego, she's genuinely surprised that he refuses to get angry at her taunts.

Up to this point, the reader also doesn't know why the young artist is so reserved. He then mentally reflects on all the bullies he's known before, and on how he simply kept his head down and refused to interact. In a sense, all previous bullies were also "its" to Naoto, as signified by the fact that he doesn't even recall the faces of his foes. However, he isn't able to distance himself from Nagatoro-- and because he's too reserved to even show obvious sexual stimulation, my conclusion is that he's fascinated by her being in most ways his utter opposite: extroverted where he's introverted, rash where he's hesitant. (One of his more significant observations later in the series is telling his girl-bully, "Everything's like a dare to you.")

In the rom-com genre there are countless stories in which two people start off in an acrimonious relationship ("I-it") and quickly progress to a mutually supportive one ("I-thou"). There are a smaller number of rom-coms in which it's a given that the contrary natures of the romantic pair will result in continuous off-and-on fights. But something about artist Nanashi's approach seems to suggest an attitude that I think compares with Buber's: the sense that both the "it" impulse and the "thou" impulse are integral to human beings generally, and remain so even when true romance blooms-- as I'll show with one more example from the early years of the series.

 

THE END OF NAGATORO

 

Since I don't follow any manga forums, I had no idea that this popular manga -- usually rendered in English as DON'T TOY WITH ME, MISS NAGATORO-- would have its conclusion published in Japan this June. Thus, the final episode, #154, was translated into English online this week in July.

Now, though I didn't know specific end-times, I was fully aware that the series would conclude soon. In many teen humor serials, the characters never age and never leave high school, ranging from ARCHIE to URUSEI YATSURA. But from the first stories, NAGATORO's author Nanshi hinted that his story would be time-centric. The male lead Naoto is introduced to the reader as a second-year in high school, while the titular Nagatoro is his junior by one year. She seemingly fixates on Naoto the first time she meets him, sarcastically using the respectful term "Senpai" toward him while in actuality she shows him no respect, at least in the earliest stories. Though I don't recall that Nanashi specifies the passage of time, once the series passed its hundredth installment it was clear that Naoto was going to graduate, for he was began studying to pass the mock exams for college. This factor became an impetus for the Naoto-Nagatoro romance, since once Naoto graduated, he would no longer see Nagatoro every school day. Nanashi set the reader up for the expectation that all the high school hijinks would have to come to an end as the protagonists left high school and began entering the world of adult work.

Nanashi made the transition just as entertaining as any of the early craziness, with lots of humor and heartache, but I puzzled over how he would wrap things up. Even in the later chapters, he introduced a handful of interesting characters, and suggested the evolution of possible subplots, such as:

(1) Is Gamo-chan really crushing on Nagatoro's older brother Taiga, and will anything come up of that possible affection?

(2) Following Nagatoro showing her commitment by being a nude model for Naoto, a teacher suggests that it would be viewed as a crime for an underage girl to expose herself that way, even for art. Would there be complications because of the romantic commitment between the two?

But no, Nanashi tamped down on further chaos in the end. When he introduced a subplot about both Naoto and Nagatoro volunteering to give year-end speeches for their respective classes, I thought that was just a minor fillip. Instead, Nanashi used the speeches as a means of describing how the two protagonists would continue their real-world aspirations, even while presumably maintaining their long-term romance until both are old enough to marry.

So the speeches they both give are descriptive of their experiences with one another, though worded as if they were more generalized descriptions of school life.

First, Nagatoro:

And then Naoto:

These are, as I said, very restrained for the NAGATORO series, and I don't know how I feel about the conclusion, even after having heard through one source that there may be an epilogue. However, the final chapter should make it possible for me to finally organize some of my thoughts on the series as a whole for a forthcoming essay. In that essay, I plan to discuss reasons why this simple-seeming teen romance comic should grab me so strongly-- much more so, I believe, than others I've celebrated here, such as NISEKOI and LOVE HINA.

THE READING RHEUM: "THE WHISPERER IN DARKNESS" (1930/1931)

 

Now this is more like it; cosmic horror the way HPL fans like it!

WHISPERER is one of the first six HPL stories I encountered in a particular collection back in The Day, and as I noted in my previous essay it eschews the dodgy dialect of HPL's immediately previous Mythos-tale DUNWICH HORROR. I'll note briefly that this time the reader also doesn't know the significance of the novella's title until the very end of the story. 

WHISPERER also resembles THE COLOUR OUF OF SPACE because it shows HPL's skill at describing the natural backdrops of the story, which in this case are the desolate woodlands of Vermont. The flooding of a local river causes the local townsfolk to circulate rumors about the corpses of mysterious beings in the waters. Albert Wilmarth, a literature teacher at Miskatonic University in Arkham, launches an amateur investigation of the rumors, writing newspaper articles on the local mythology of the aboriginal Indians. These essays cause a local farmer, Henry Akeley, to contact Wilmarth about his own experiences.

Though most of the exchanges between Wilmarth and Akeley are in the form of letters, this epistolary method of storytelling never sacrifices any tension. Akeley tells Wilmarth that for months his secluded farm has been besieged by mysterious beings which, when glimpsed at all, look like winged, claw-handed humanoids. The two humans eventually learn that these beings, "the Outer Ones," are visitors from the planet Yuggoth (Pluto), and they've set up a clandestine mining-operation in the vicinity of Akeley's farm. Only Akeley's supply of guns and guard-dogs has preserved him from being killed or abducted by these alien intruders. Eventually Wilmarth hears enough to convince him of the farmer's veracity, but by the time he physically arrives at the farm, he encounters what he thinks is Akeley, but is in truth "the whisperer in darkness."

Before I began this review-project, I mentioned here that I wondered if any of HPL's Mythos stories registered as crossovers. After all, the cosmic horror of WHISPERER is enhanced by two major sequences in which the human protagonists are exposed to an overwhelming variety of references to dozens of alien beings, domains, and deities, some original with HPL, some invented by authors with whom the writer was friendly, like Robert E Howard, Frank Belknap Long, and Clark Ashton Smith. (Smith had apparently shown HPL his story "The Story of Satamptra Zeros," because that tale, which was the debut of Smith's toadlike god Tsatthoggua, didn't see print until after WHISPERER did.) 

All these arcane references built up HPL's vision of a bizarre universe beyond the ken of human reason-- but references, in my system, count only as "null-crossovers." However, though the main monsters of WHISPERER are the Outer Ones-- who had previously appeared in an HPL poem, "Fungi from Yuggoth"-- they do apparently enlist one of the "Great Old Ones" to deceive Wilmarth. HPL subtly mentions that the "mighty messenger" Nyarlathotep-- who was the narrative focus of a 1920 tale-- "shall put on the semblance of men." And this imposture proves necessary because, unlike the Outer Ones with their wings and claws, Nyarlathotep has already been established as being able to pass for human. So, in addition to THE DREAM-QUEST OF UNKNOWN KADATH. WHISPERER is a bonafide crossover story.

THE READING RHEUM: "THE DUNWICH HORROR" (1928/1929)

 Though I respect THE DUNWICH HORROR as a major Lovecraft work, I've never liked the story that much, and my re-reading of an annotated version didn't make that much difference. At most, the annotations made clear how much HPL was indebted to the Judeo-Christian mythology of angels mating with mortals-- which myth-trope was of course also derived from stories of pagan deities begetting demigods on humans. For instance, Klinger notes that one of the angel-references mentioned by HPL was to "Azazel," an angel with that precise reputation.

The opening of DUNWICH provides some strong description of the Massachusetts town of Dunwich, and of its multitudinous associations with the New England witch-trials and with the older pagan traditions of the Amerindians. In addition, HPL dumps on almost the entirety of the rural population of the area, expanding on his disgust for Joe Slater in 1919's BEYOND THE WALL OF SLEEP. I was rather surprised, for two reasons, to read a line in which the writer tore down these "white trash" for their history of "half-hidden murders, incests, and deeds of almost unnamable violence and perversity." On one level I found this odd because subjects of murder and incest were the common coin of the Gothic fiction that HPL thoroughly lambasted in his overview of horror fiction, SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE. On a second level, it's weird to hear DUNWICH associated with "incest," because it's about a mortal woman who has sex with an extradimensional creature-- which is about as "out-cest" as one can get. I can only conclude that HPL wasn't above associating one form of abominable sexuality with another, even though the fantasy of demon-coitus has nothing to do with familial interbreeding.

I also didn't like HPL's buildup to his big reveal. For most of the story, the author keeps the focus on the repulsive figure of Wilbur Whatley, the offspring of Lavinia Whatley and the demon-god Yog-Sothoth (making his debut as a "featured Old One.") While keeping the reader busy with Wilbur's peregrinations-- which are focused on obtaining information on occult rituals in order to unleash his demonic father on Earth-- HPL throws in a secondary mystery, about Wilbur's earthly father building a huge extra room atop the Whatley farmhouse and buying cattle that no neighbor ever sees again. Wilbur is slain at one point, and his half-alien body is revealed to onlookers. The big reveal, though, is that Lavinia Whatley also spawned a second son, a huge amorphous thing that occupied the extra room, with only tangential humanity, and this offspring is also killed when a Miskatonic U scholar, Doctor Armitage, is able to defeat the ritual and banish Yog-Sothoth.

Another problem with the story is that HPL is pretty bad with both his rural characters and their dialect. He kept dialogue to a minimum in THE COLOUR OUT OF SPACE. But in DUNWICH, there's a lot of farmer-talk, and it's excruciating. Fortunately, in the next Mythos story HPL eschewed almost all dialogue in yet another of his ventures into rural New England, and the results were far better. 

I note in passing that as far as I recall, the 1970 cinematic adaptation doesn't show Wilbur as being having a repugnant alien physiology that he hides from other humans, and the ending of the film is stronger for not "giving away the game" too early.

MYTHCOMICS: "TRIUMPH OF THE TORNADO TYRANT" (JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #17, 1963)

This Gardner Fox JLA tale, while not as well-thought-out as the classic "Justice League's Impossible Adventure," nevertheless possesses a good myth-discourse which upgrades the standard "problem" of heroes overcoming villains to a "conundrum" about how that scenario can be validated.

The first page of the narrative proper begins with the heroes of the JLA celebrating their triumph over some stony-faced aliens. Batman opines that evildoers ought to realize that they have no chance against the forces of justice. J'onn J'onzz counters by saying that it's because such menaces exist that "they make us heroes." Just then, all of the heroes' bodies dissolve. An attack by one of those menaces?

No, all the heroes seen here are proxies for an alien being, the Tornado Champion-- who in some ways is using the Justice League of his comic-book universe much as the readers of the title do: to celebrate the virtues of goodness. The Champion had one exploit as "The Tornado Tyrant," menacing the planet Rann until being defeated by Adam Strange (also written by Fox in MYSTERY IN SPACE #61). He comes to admire the Justice League so much that he wants to emulate them exactly, and so he creates an exact duplicate of Planet Earth, except that he himself embodies the Justice Leaguers so that he can experience the inevitable triumph of good over evil.

However, Tornado-Fanboy doesn't overcome the evil in his own nature quite that easily. From "the ocean depths" (or maybe from the collective subconscious of the tornado-species), a duplicate Tornado-Being manifests, and this new Tyrant masters all of the Champion's ersatz Leaguers, mostly by either undermining their powers or turning them against one another. But before the Tyrant can eradicate the heroes, the Champion re-absorbs its component parts (using a "tornado-ship" like the one seen in the ADAM STRANGE story). He then decides that the only way he can formulate a counter strategy is by traveling to Earth to find out how the real heroes would cope. This means that he must, in essence, take the part of his villainous self, splitting off a part of his Champion-self to create a phony Tornado Tyrant to bedevil the real heroes.

Now, simplistic though all these complications may sound, Fox set himself a conundrum: to come up with a rationale as to WHY good should always be able to conquer evil. Six years later, a STAR TREK episode, "The Savage Curtain," tries to do something similar, though the conundrum there was to explain the difference between good and evil to an alien being. But how does one provide an answer for a foregone conclusion dictated by nothing but a literary trope?

And Fox's answer to his own conundrum-- is continuity.

So the Real Leaguers are defeated by the Fake Tyrant, just as the Fake heroes were defeated by the Real Tyrant. But unlike the imitation heroes, who only enjoy the simulacra of real lives, the real crusaders have gained a wealth of experience contending with menaces-- rather than, say, conjuring up faux enemies that can be vanquished easily. 

Thus, while the heroes collect their thoughts, they apply a certain amount of ratiocinative deduction. They debate as to whether the Tyrant's proxies might have been seeking to eradicate centers of atomic power to cover some vulnerability, but then dismiss the idea as untenable. However, the reason Author Fox included that blind alley-clue was to lead the heroes to a correct conclusion, even though only the real-world readers know why it's correct. The Tornado Being is not created by radiation, but it does have a dual personality-- and Green Lantern, drawing on one of his previous adventures (actually written by Fox's colleague John Broome), chooses to use "anti-energy" on the Tyrant as he did on a previous enemy that was a split-personality resulting from an atomic mishap. This strategy works for the Earth-heroes and destroys the Fake Tyrant. Yet the same process can't work for the observing Tornado Champion. If he tries to create anti-energy to destroy his evil self, he'll destroy himself as well.

But the Champion still prevails, by using another form of continuity. Since his proxies can't create anti-energy, they transport the Real Tyrant into the universe from which anti-energy came: "the anti-matter universe"-- which I assume is also a bit of continuity Fox also derived from Broome's GREEN LANTERN, though Fox doesn't explicitly reference Broome's "world of Qward."

If this was Fox's intention-- omitted to save space or reduce confusion in his young audience-- this would be doubly impressive, because in Broome the anti-matter world is also one dominated by evil-- and thus sending the Tyrant there is like consigning the "devil" in one's own nature back to perdition. 

I should note that in his Silver Age career Fox showed a penchant for stories in which he presented secondary scenarios in which characters "re-wrote" whatever initial scenarios Fox placed them in. I see this penchant as contributory to the way this Fox story solves the conundrum of "how can good always conquer evil:" by recognizing that this question itself is a literary trope, and that it can only be "solved" by invoking other tropes.

PHASED AND INTERFUSED PT. 4

While I guess I could follow up my meditations on the phase shifts of Lois Lane with an essay on, say, Jimmy Olsen, I'll take a 180-degree turn here (however brief) into a similar dynamic I found in a pop-fiction take on a venerable myth from the Hebrew Old Testament.

I won't go into the plot of the 1952 QUEEN OF SHEBA, since I adequately summarized the movie in my review. What makes it relevant to the phase shift I described is that the original texts from the Old Testament, principally "Kings," Solomon is the Prime while the Queen of Sheba-- later given the proper name "Balkis" by Islamic commentary-- is a Sub. So is Rehoboam, son of Solomon. But in the 1952 movie, both of them are Primes, while Solomon becomes a Sub who barely impacts the narrative. But there is no crossover-vibe at all in the movie. Even though Balkis and Rehoboam have absolutely no interaction in the Old Testament, they are both aligned to the "Solomon cosmos." Thus, when the movie centers upon these two characters and relegates Solomon to Sub status, the phase shift involved follows the same pattern as Lois Lane assuming Prime status and demoting Superman.

In contrast, the 2004 film NOAH is a valid crossover of two disparate figures in the Old Testament. There are no associations there between Noah and Tubal-Cain in scripture, except in the generic sense that both are incredibly long-lived figures. For that reason, the movie supposes that Tubal-Cain slew Noah's father Lamech, despite the fact that scripture does not reference Lamech's death in any way. Since Tubal-Cain does not sustain his own narrative, I suppose I would deem him a Sub within the story of his progenitor Cain, so making him a Sub within a pop-fiction version of Noah's narrative is only a minor shift in his Sub-alignment.