My Appendix N: Anime & Manga

Armored Trooper Votoms

Stow the attitude, you knew this post was coming. It is time for us to continue our journey through my personal Appendix N, and anime and manga were definite influences. This is going to be quite a bit different as it's not going to be a list. I'm going to talk about why something so foreign to western sensibilities managed to break in and change the way many of my generation and younger see storytelling.

Here we go: it's anime and manga time.

Now saying anime is an influence has apparently taken a different sort of meaning in recent years since the mid-00s when the industry decided to pander to otaku over normal customers, so I have to stress to those unaware that anime as it is now is not as it was before. The reason many western viewers watch anime now is very different to why they used to forty, thirty, or even fifteen, years ago. Not that I can't enjoy some good modern anime, but the reason it sucked me in is different to the reason most enjoy it now.

I'm in it for the hotblooded conflicts and adventure.

There are two different branches this influence comes from so please be patient as I explain each. First I'm going to start with the one that doesn't have much in the way of anime adaptions, mostly locked entirely to manga with the occasional early 90s OVA adaption. You might not know much about this one. I'm referring to the delinquent genre.

Kiku

Technically starting near the beginning of modern manga through series such as Ashita no Joe, this is the story of a modern teenage youth dissatisfied with a society that undervalues traditional masculinity and has no place for it, or them. It epitomizes a society lost inside itself. These stories can vary from being about confused youth such as Rokudenashi Blues in not knowing the way to adapt to society, to stories of how friendship can save you in series like Kiku, to even about finding love and a woman to protect and becoming a man despite it all.

But there was more to it than that. Kyou Kara Ore Wa!! was a comedy about a boy who decided to be a delinquent one day and ends up in chaotic situation after chaotic situation. Cromartie High was a parody on the genre while at the same time understanding its foibles and strengths. There was a lot of flexibility of the style. For a good while it was the second most popular genre behind action and adventure.

Of course the most popular delinquent series, and probably the biggest the genre will ever get, was merging adventure with the style in Yu Yu Hakusho. The story was about aggressive youth Yusuke Urameshi, a worthless punk who decides to save a boy's life out of the blue which ends up killing him. He is then given a second chance at life as a spirit detective to hunt down those who would do harm to humanity. This one combines the best of delinquent series with the popular battle shonen formula to become one of anime's most well known. The anime was a massive hit, and it still remains the only delinquent manga that isn't some sort of parody to get a proper anime adaption.

This sort of manga got really popular in the late 80s through the late 90s before it got usurped by the milquetoast harem protagonist overtaking just about everything. Since then it has been mostly glorified yakuza stories with teenage characters or parodies treading the same jokes.

Bucchigiri: Bad Boy Boogie

The closest thing to this genre we had in the west hadn't really been around for decades with old Hollywood movies. Those movies were more interested in glamorizing misspent youth than exploring why aggression and anger like this might even occur and what it might be used for to benefit society and others. It requires understanding masculinity in a way no one in charge is willing to.

Even Japan must find this sort of thing uncomfortable, though. After all, as I said, these series rarely ever got anime adaptions, probably due to sponsors and advertisers not finding this sort of thing very friendly to the majority of the population or their higher-ups. Perhaps they're right. Either way, it is definitely an interesting genre when it is done right.

Unfortunately, outside of random examples it is mostly gone today. You might find a delinquent character in a manga or anime now but it is rare that they are ever portrayed as anything other than an idiot or a one dimensional thug for the hero to beat down.

Times change, but these stories don't age much. And they still beat what ended up replacing them even years after the fact.

But that's only half of what inspired me.

Aside from this genre the most obvious influence for me is the same it is for most anyone who got into anime before the late 00s, and that is the adventure genre.

Fist of the North Star

It started in the early 90s on a station from Canada called YTV. They used to air cartoons and kid shows from all over the world from every era at the time. One of the series they used to air was a little known one, at the time, called Dragon Ball. This was the original show, to be exact. Watch a comically powerful kid go on an adventure through a strange fairy land to make a wish on the legendary Dragon Balls. They only aired the first 13 episodes which is was but one arc but they left their impression. That was the first anime I ever really got into.

I later discovered series and movies such as Robotech / Macross, Ronin Warriors, Teknoman, Galaxy Express 999, Akira, and the like, which stuck with me long afterwards. The elemental armors in Knights of the End, for example, are inspired by Ronin Warriors even though they work more like they do in Saint Seiya. Suffice to say anime left its mark on me.

It was only later that I discovered darker fare such as Ninja Scroll, Bubblegum Crisis, or Vampire Hunter D. This rabbit hole went deeper than I thought! By high school I had learned just what this whole anime and manga thing were all about, and I had begun diving into it..

But the peak of the whole thing came around the late '90s when I discovered a trio of series known as the Space Western Trilogy among those in the know. All releasing in 1998 and all were giant hits overseas as opposed to at home, the three of them went on to become some of the highest selling series in the west. But they were also great.

Of course I don't have to tell you that I'm talking about Outlaw Star, Cowboy Bebop, and Trigun. These three changed the game.

Trigun

I would be remiss to not mention that around this time Viz Media began to finally put manga out here in both the original unflipped right to left format but also in magazine form as Shonen Jump became a monthly release in the west. This meant manga had finally cracked the market and reading classics like Rurouni Kenshin (better than the anime!), Flame of Recca (the manga is in a whole other league) and those mentioned above became quite a good deal easier to read.

Not long after Viz licensed a series from Naoki Urasawa called Monster. The anime was a good adaption, but it was long and has since become hard to find. So it is the manga which stuck around long after and is the more well known. This is a series about a doctor who saves the wrong patient after being told to abandon him. This leads him into a world of corruption and hidden evil as he tries to find the right answer. It is a battle between good and evil where the stakes are souls and identity.

His follow-up series, 20th Century Boys, is another good against evil series, this time being more of a combination of Stephen King's The Stand and It with a heavy dose of pulp in the veins and far less degeneracy. It was adapted to a trio of live action movies, but the manga still stands as the best way to experience the story.

It was about at this time the original anime and manga boom began to die off. Shady publishers such as Tokyopop and over-saturation were key reasons, but also because Japan decided to crack down on piracy by appealing their products to hardcore otaku instead of those who wanted more series such as Trigun, Monster, or Full Metal Alchemist. They doubled down on easy money at the expense of experimentation or wider audience satisfaction.

To be sure, such series were still made but were pushed to the side when they were once the focus of the industry and created the overseas success anime and manga still enjoy now. But that first boom is what influenced many of those like me.

Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba

What is important to note is that should you take anime and manga out of the equation, entertainment options in the late '90s and '00s are limited by quite a good deal. There are those who to this day think of anime and manga as this weird anomaly that came out of nowhere and that is completely nonsensical in the wider scheme of things. It went from being known as that "tentacle porn" thing in the "Japanimation" days to being known as wish fulfillment for the dateless in the moe era, neither of which are the case. Those who call themselves action and adventure aficionados have bypassed much of the best of it due to preconceptions of an entire genre formed on a minority example. I can't imagine being a writer of the fantastical and completely ignoring anime and manga. You might as we go watch Disney Star Wars and the rest of the stale modern pap being pushed out by modern mega-corporations.

Watch a few episodes of the original Macross (or Robotech if you have to) or Cowboy Bebop, or Escaflowne, and you will be stunned at the level of storytelling and creativity it has that the mainstream is entirely missing today and has been for many years.

While the medium has its own problems, as some of those infamous stigmas it has are real, the medium still remains far above what you will find in western comic books or television today. It still remains the best place to find pulp inspired stories outside of the printed word. If it wasn't for anime and manga I don't think I ever would have pursued writing, as action based storytelling had all but been banished by the time I picked up that issue of Dragon Ball back in the day. I'm not alone in that, either.

So yes, it has had a massive influence on what I write and how I perceive stories. I even have an idea for a future post examining these strengths and weaknesses the mediums have. For now, though, it has proven itself to be one of the few remaining positive influences on future writers, animators, and comic artists, and one that should be watched and examined. There is something there worth exploring.

And so ends this entry. Next post I will go into a less controversial area that will be sure to entertain. How do video games influence fiction writing and thought processes? I guess we'll see.

Until next time.