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There is no time for cracking up, believe me, friend
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gaudior, who handed me seven volumes of Saiyuki Reload yesterday, and therefore whose fault it is that I read them all last night. (And dreamed, for no reason that I can think of, about historical reenactments in a house with too many rooms and the ghost of a presidential lawyer, who by all rights should have been John Adams, except this was a dream and therefore he was someone who doesn't exist in this world. In addition to being better at plotting than I am, my subconscious also seems to write better alternate history. Now if only we collaborated more often.) Kazuya Minekura, write faster! The rest of you, have some fannishness.
So I had been about to write that while I suspect Sha Gojyo and Cho Hakkai are often popularly paired off as a couple, I am more interested in the ways in which they interact as a family. Then I realized that, for both of them, concepts of family are incestuous: Hakkai who was his sister's lover, Gojyo who watched his brother have sex with his mother to keep her from abusing Gojyo, and for both of them their half-human, half-youkai natures are tangled up with serious guilt and love. Hakkai spilled the blood of a thousand youkai to rescue his beloved sister, but she killed herself rather than bear the child of her rapist, and against his will Hakkai became a youkai himself. Beaten and despised as a halfbreed and the visible reminder of his youkai father's infidelity, Gojyo was ready to let his stepmother kill him if that would at last have made her love him, but instead he watched her die at his brother's hands. It's all inseparable.gaudior has mentioned that while she considers the four main characters of Saiyuki to be on her list of characters whose canonical relationships are so complex that slash would actually simplify them, Gojyo and Hakkai have always struck her as the most plausible of the potential pairings,* which now makes sense—the sexual overtones would be reinforced rather than canceled out by the familial nature of their relationship, and vice versa. This doesn't mean that you are going to see me writing Gojyo-and-Hakkai slash any time soon. But I think it's an observation worth noting (although I suspect other readers have gotten here ahead of me; I am a latecomer to the series). And I find it fascinating that this combination, which should be a recipe for damage and disaster, has instead created perhaps a healthier relationship between the two characters than anything either had with his blood family.** If nothing else, all the boundaries that their childhoods have hardwired them to cross are not in fact in place. They are not related; they are roughly species-equivalent. And they are neither of them fragile.
I really feel there should be somewhere else I can take this train of thought, but no obvious next step suggests itself. Anyone?
*Her second most plausible is Kougaiji and Dokugakuji, which I think plays right back into the theme of family-as-lovers: more than once Dokugakuji, who was born Sha Jien, mentions that he took service with Kougaiji because the prince reminded him of his own younger brother, the red-haired, red-eyed "child of taboo" Gojyo.
**This statement needs no substantiation in the case of Gojyo, whose home life was a nightmare. From what we see in flashback, however, Hakkai and Kanan seem to have been a deliriously happy couple, and one could imagine them contentedly living out the rest the rest of their lives in whatever little village they had settled down in, assuming the Minus Wave that destabilized human-youkai relationships had never occurred. But the fact that he committed mass murder without a second thought for her sake and she committed suicide in front of him after her rape—and I have very strong feelings about suicide as a hostile act, so I may be overreacting to this scene—indicates to me that perhaps they were not, after all, the most stable people in the world.
gaudior, who handed me seven volumes of Saiyuki Reload yesterday, and therefore whose fault it is that I read them all last night. (And dreamed, for no reason that I can think of, about historical reenactments in a house with too many rooms and the ghost of a presidential lawyer, who by all rights should have been John Adams, except this was a dream and therefore he was someone who doesn't exist in this world. In addition to being better at plotting than I am, my subconscious also seems to write better alternate history. Now if only we collaborated more often.) Kazuya Minekura, write faster! The rest of you, have some fannishness.So I had been about to write that while I suspect Sha Gojyo and Cho Hakkai are often popularly paired off as a couple, I am more interested in the ways in which they interact as a family. Then I realized that, for both of them, concepts of family are incestuous: Hakkai who was his sister's lover, Gojyo who watched his brother have sex with his mother to keep her from abusing Gojyo, and for both of them their half-human, half-youkai natures are tangled up with serious guilt and love. Hakkai spilled the blood of a thousand youkai to rescue his beloved sister, but she killed herself rather than bear the child of her rapist, and against his will Hakkai became a youkai himself. Beaten and despised as a halfbreed and the visible reminder of his youkai father's infidelity, Gojyo was ready to let his stepmother kill him if that would at last have made her love him, but instead he watched her die at his brother's hands. It's all inseparable.
gaudior has mentioned that while she considers the four main characters of Saiyuki to be on her list of characters whose canonical relationships are so complex that slash would actually simplify them, Gojyo and Hakkai have always struck her as the most plausible of the potential pairings,* which now makes sense—the sexual overtones would be reinforced rather than canceled out by the familial nature of their relationship, and vice versa. This doesn't mean that you are going to see me writing Gojyo-and-Hakkai slash any time soon. But I think it's an observation worth noting (although I suspect other readers have gotten here ahead of me; I am a latecomer to the series). And I find it fascinating that this combination, which should be a recipe for damage and disaster, has instead created perhaps a healthier relationship between the two characters than anything either had with his blood family.** If nothing else, all the boundaries that their childhoods have hardwired them to cross are not in fact in place. They are not related; they are roughly species-equivalent. And they are neither of them fragile.I really feel there should be somewhere else I can take this train of thought, but no obvious next step suggests itself. Anyone?
*Her second most plausible is Kougaiji and Dokugakuji, which I think plays right back into the theme of family-as-lovers: more than once Dokugakuji, who was born Sha Jien, mentions that he took service with Kougaiji because the prince reminded him of his own younger brother, the red-haired, red-eyed "child of taboo" Gojyo.
**This statement needs no substantiation in the case of Gojyo, whose home life was a nightmare. From what we see in flashback, however, Hakkai and Kanan seem to have been a deliriously happy couple, and one could imagine them contentedly living out the rest the rest of their lives in whatever little village they had settled down in, assuming the Minus Wave that destabilized human-youkai relationships had never occurred. But the fact that he committed mass murder without a second thought for her sake and she committed suicide in front of him after her rape—and I have very strong feelings about suicide as a hostile act, so I may be overreacting to this scene—indicates to me that perhaps they were not, after all, the most stable people in the world.
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Has she written any other manga you recommend?
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I have read Saiyuki and as much Reload as been translated in this country; I still need to find Saiyuki Gaiden.
is an AU of Wild Adapter which removes the speculative elements and sets the characters down in high school for some madcap adventures
That's kind of neat.
Wild Adapter also sounds like the one I'd be most interested in reading.
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I quite like Araiso, but mainly for the ways it contrasts and interacts with Wild Adapter. The first volume of WA is currently available in English.