Earthian Review/Thoughts
Jun. 12th, 2009 10:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
labingiEarthian: A Few Thoughts
The Earthian manga didn't do it for me. A lot of people love it, and I'm sure it comes down to a matter of taste, so I'll just make a few brief reviewish comments.
Caveats: Two things predispose me to be unfair to this series: 1) I only read volumes 2 and 3 (vol. 1 was too expensive for an experimental reading, and after 3, I decided not to proceed to 4). This certainly contributed to some confusion at the start of vol. 2 (though I was helped by reviews and the anime). 2) I'm not really a fan of manga as a medium. Unless I'm using it to practice a foreign language, it doesn't give me enough text per book to feel satisfying.
Summary (non-spoilery): Earthian is a BL series about a species of "angels" (aliens) who send agents to Earth to evaluate the behavior of humans ("Earthians"). They add up pluses for good behavior and minuses for bad behavior, and if the bad behavior prevails at the end of the experiment, they may choose to destroy the Earth. Meanwhile, among the angels, homosexuality is punishable by death, which is tricky for plus-and-minus-checking team, Chihaya and Kagetsuya, as they happen to fall in love.
SPOILERS follow:
The Bad
* The girls. As one might expect from a manga in which the men are drawn like feminine women, the women are drawn like parodies of Barbie dolls (at least the angel women) and behave as that implies. They are simpering sweeties, sassy shouters, or love-obsessed teens with the maturity of ten year olds, or some combination of the above. The text reinforces the rightness of all these behaviors, which is annoying. (If some of the men had been women - no physical alteration required - it might have been interesting. Likewise, if the male angels' propensity to fall in love with each other and not the girls had been explored in terms of the girls' incredible unattractiveness, it might also have been interesting.)
* In the end of volume 3, a lack of dialogism. When it came to the imminent destruction of the Earth, everything the good guys did was "right," and everything the bad guy did was "wrong." There was little attempt at discursive complexity and little plausible motivation for the bad guy. Moreover, this lack of substantial discussion produced the predictable effect: illogic in the good guys' motivations. Namely, they love the entire "Earth," yet this keeps getting conflated with "humanity," as if these were one and the same.
* On that subject, the ecocritic in me notes unhelpful environmental discourse. To be fair, it's helpful insofar as it exists. They talk about mass extinction, ozone depletion, global warming, how sad it is that humans do this to their lovely planet. Kudos for that. Seriously. I haven't encountered many manga/anime that do so as a major theme. But the discourse of "but humans are great, love conquers all, and the Earth won't let humans die/destroy everything as long as the angels leave well enough alone" is very unhelpful to any realistic attempt to promote ecological awareness. It reminds me (at risk of offending someone) of when I asked a couple of Mormon lads what they thought about overpopulation as a side-effect of the kind of large family their religion promotes, and after looking at me baffled for a few seconds, they said, "I don't know, but I'm sure God will take care of it, or else he wouldn't have commanded it." May they be correct! But I fear I stand with G. B. Shaw's view of human evolution in this respect: the pitiless reply still remains that God helps those who help themselves.
* Over-personalization of the epic: When the issue of whether or not to destroy the Earth comes down to one guy in a room apparently making every decision himself (for an entire civilization), staring out a window and asking, "What will you do now, Chihaya?", it destroys any sense of realism, of interesting discourse, of good character development, and reverts us to the cackling villain of 1940s comics.
The Good (Yes, there is good!)
* Speaking of Raphael (the "villain"), I found him quite nuanced in volume 2. Even when he claimed to be "the villain," I liked it. It felt like a nicely ironic, tongue-in-cheek observation of his interestingly gray role as a conservative member of this civilization who upholds laws like execution (of everyone from homosexuals to planets) while being rather openly homosexual himself (in desire, not action) and completely failing at his own responsibilities as a husband to produce children. I liked his attitude of "I feel just like you do, but I'm not going to cross the line, and I expect you not to either - and if you do, I'm going to be rather smug about the whole thing." I missed that when he turned into straightforward "villain" in vol. 3.
* Homosexual discourse. The text didn't make homosexuality punishable just as a random plot point; it actually made a lot of sense. Angels have a rather infrequent estrus cycle. Their population is declining. For some reason, they seem increasingly prone to homosexual desire, which could, indeed, be devastating to their population if they act on it during the one brief time when they could be conceiving children with the opposite sex. (Sure, they should look into artificial insemination, but I'll forgive that, just because it does create the outline of a real dilemma. Maybe A.I. doesn't work in angels!) Under those conditions, yeah, there's a real case to be made for criminalizing homosexual sex. Now, making it a capital offense makes about as much sense as the last remnant of humanity in Battlestar Galactica executing their criminals, but well. I also liked that homosexuality was not regarded as shocking. Rather, as a feeling, it seemed almost normative. It was just regarded as an impulse to resist. I liked all this because it was plausible, worthy of genuine debate, and different from our usual assumptions about homophobia.
* Cultural difference. The angels' bugaboo with the Earth is that Earthians are wild, destructive, etc., suggesting that angels are not. And while vol. 3 shows that they sure can be, there actually seems to be some real reason to feel this way. Here, I think the personalization of everything worked pretty well. Bureaucracy/oppression is less like Big Brother than like parents watching children squabble, or maybe teachers watching students in a small school. Major romantic crisis and jealousy read like a couple of sweet-tempered twelve-year-old girls getting mad over a boy and then rushing into each other's arms to apologize amid tears. While this verges of silly, I liked it because it did seem culturally different. It gave me a sense of angels as, well, angelic, in their sweetness and innocence (in daily life) as opposed to the more brutal edge of human war and destruction. (The text, however, could have sold this better if the human characters had showed a sharper contrast in behavior - a bit less with the high school girls talking of romance. The evil scientist guy works!)
* The angels' hyperfeminine appearance works, too, insofar as it conveys a different species with a somewhat different physique and, again, different cultural expectations.
* Chihaya and Kagetsuya, last but not least. While they do not always inhabit a story that displays them to the best effect, they do make a good couple, a good contrast of personalities. Kouga is right on in making us wait to see them have sex; this allows a chance to build their relationship, which is about very much more than sex. I would thoroughly enjoy these two in a better story structure. In fact, I enjoyed them a bit more in the anime.
Well, this ended up longer than I intended, but those are the highlights.
The Earthian manga didn't do it for me. A lot of people love it, and I'm sure it comes down to a matter of taste, so I'll just make a few brief reviewish comments.
Caveats: Two things predispose me to be unfair to this series: 1) I only read volumes 2 and 3 (vol. 1 was too expensive for an experimental reading, and after 3, I decided not to proceed to 4). This certainly contributed to some confusion at the start of vol. 2 (though I was helped by reviews and the anime). 2) I'm not really a fan of manga as a medium. Unless I'm using it to practice a foreign language, it doesn't give me enough text per book to feel satisfying.
Summary (non-spoilery): Earthian is a BL series about a species of "angels" (aliens) who send agents to Earth to evaluate the behavior of humans ("Earthians"). They add up pluses for good behavior and minuses for bad behavior, and if the bad behavior prevails at the end of the experiment, they may choose to destroy the Earth. Meanwhile, among the angels, homosexuality is punishable by death, which is tricky for plus-and-minus-checking team, Chihaya and Kagetsuya, as they happen to fall in love.
SPOILERS follow:
The Bad
* The girls. As one might expect from a manga in which the men are drawn like feminine women, the women are drawn like parodies of Barbie dolls (at least the angel women) and behave as that implies. They are simpering sweeties, sassy shouters, or love-obsessed teens with the maturity of ten year olds, or some combination of the above. The text reinforces the rightness of all these behaviors, which is annoying. (If some of the men had been women - no physical alteration required - it might have been interesting. Likewise, if the male angels' propensity to fall in love with each other and not the girls had been explored in terms of the girls' incredible unattractiveness, it might also have been interesting.)
* In the end of volume 3, a lack of dialogism. When it came to the imminent destruction of the Earth, everything the good guys did was "right," and everything the bad guy did was "wrong." There was little attempt at discursive complexity and little plausible motivation for the bad guy. Moreover, this lack of substantial discussion produced the predictable effect: illogic in the good guys' motivations. Namely, they love the entire "Earth," yet this keeps getting conflated with "humanity," as if these were one and the same.
* On that subject, the ecocritic in me notes unhelpful environmental discourse. To be fair, it's helpful insofar as it exists. They talk about mass extinction, ozone depletion, global warming, how sad it is that humans do this to their lovely planet. Kudos for that. Seriously. I haven't encountered many manga/anime that do so as a major theme. But the discourse of "but humans are great, love conquers all, and the Earth won't let humans die/destroy everything as long as the angels leave well enough alone" is very unhelpful to any realistic attempt to promote ecological awareness. It reminds me (at risk of offending someone) of when I asked a couple of Mormon lads what they thought about overpopulation as a side-effect of the kind of large family their religion promotes, and after looking at me baffled for a few seconds, they said, "I don't know, but I'm sure God will take care of it, or else he wouldn't have commanded it." May they be correct! But I fear I stand with G. B. Shaw's view of human evolution in this respect: the pitiless reply still remains that God helps those who help themselves.
* Over-personalization of the epic: When the issue of whether or not to destroy the Earth comes down to one guy in a room apparently making every decision himself (for an entire civilization), staring out a window and asking, "What will you do now, Chihaya?", it destroys any sense of realism, of interesting discourse, of good character development, and reverts us to the cackling villain of 1940s comics.
The Good (Yes, there is good!)
* Speaking of Raphael (the "villain"), I found him quite nuanced in volume 2. Even when he claimed to be "the villain," I liked it. It felt like a nicely ironic, tongue-in-cheek observation of his interestingly gray role as a conservative member of this civilization who upholds laws like execution (of everyone from homosexuals to planets) while being rather openly homosexual himself (in desire, not action) and completely failing at his own responsibilities as a husband to produce children. I liked his attitude of "I feel just like you do, but I'm not going to cross the line, and I expect you not to either - and if you do, I'm going to be rather smug about the whole thing." I missed that when he turned into straightforward "villain" in vol. 3.
* Homosexual discourse. The text didn't make homosexuality punishable just as a random plot point; it actually made a lot of sense. Angels have a rather infrequent estrus cycle. Their population is declining. For some reason, they seem increasingly prone to homosexual desire, which could, indeed, be devastating to their population if they act on it during the one brief time when they could be conceiving children with the opposite sex. (Sure, they should look into artificial insemination, but I'll forgive that, just because it does create the outline of a real dilemma. Maybe A.I. doesn't work in angels!) Under those conditions, yeah, there's a real case to be made for criminalizing homosexual sex. Now, making it a capital offense makes about as much sense as the last remnant of humanity in Battlestar Galactica executing their criminals, but well. I also liked that homosexuality was not regarded as shocking. Rather, as a feeling, it seemed almost normative. It was just regarded as an impulse to resist. I liked all this because it was plausible, worthy of genuine debate, and different from our usual assumptions about homophobia.
* Cultural difference. The angels' bugaboo with the Earth is that Earthians are wild, destructive, etc., suggesting that angels are not. And while vol. 3 shows that they sure can be, there actually seems to be some real reason to feel this way. Here, I think the personalization of everything worked pretty well. Bureaucracy/oppression is less like Big Brother than like parents watching children squabble, or maybe teachers watching students in a small school. Major romantic crisis and jealousy read like a couple of sweet-tempered twelve-year-old girls getting mad over a boy and then rushing into each other's arms to apologize amid tears. While this verges of silly, I liked it because it did seem culturally different. It gave me a sense of angels as, well, angelic, in their sweetness and innocence (in daily life) as opposed to the more brutal edge of human war and destruction. (The text, however, could have sold this better if the human characters had showed a sharper contrast in behavior - a bit less with the high school girls talking of romance. The evil scientist guy works!)
* The angels' hyperfeminine appearance works, too, insofar as it conveys a different species with a somewhat different physique and, again, different cultural expectations.
* Chihaya and Kagetsuya, last but not least. While they do not always inhabit a story that displays them to the best effect, they do make a good couple, a good contrast of personalities. Kouga is right on in making us wait to see them have sex; this allows a chance to build their relationship, which is about very much more than sex. I would thoroughly enjoy these two in a better story structure. In fact, I enjoyed them a bit more in the anime.
Well, this ended up longer than I intended, but those are the highlights.
