I wrote my first Negima! post (here on Ghostlightning’s joint) about Nodoka and Yue, as I was bound to do so by favoritism and other darker things in the crevices between human comprehension. It was almost physically painful to have to pick two characters out of that cast of worthies…and as I was mulling that over, it occurred to me that blog-space isn’t exactly about to run out, so here we are.

First mentioned to me by Owen (here), Ako didn’t quite make the cut when it came time for me to choose a subject (or subjects) for my “Showing a Bit of Character” post. That Negima! gave me more time to fanboy over Nodoka had a lot to do with it, but there’s also the matter of Ako’s being a little too meta for the kind of post I wanted to write. One could write a post about Ako and encompass within it examinations of any number of minor characters, Nodoka and Yue included — in which case they might have been eclipsed in the post’s structure, and I didn’t want that.

That’s not to say Ako is a better minor character, necessarily. But, in terms of Negima! deconstructing the universe, she is the minor character: she comes to stand for the concept itself, and she’s at least a little genre-savvy about it.

When Ako enters the school festival arc in earnest, she’s…

Playing the bass! Shit yeah! (It’s in her head at that point, but she does play for real later on.)

Enthusiasm aside, the bass guitar seems to have a reputation in anime as an instrument for side characters¹. If I remember correctly, Mio plays bass in K-ON! because she figures it won’t make her stand out, and she isn’t really wrong in terms of anime tropes. But, as both characters more or less demonstrate, it’s not as if the bass isn’t important in its own right. Where would a string ensemble be without its double bass? Where would the Red Hot Chili Peppers be without Flea? I’d say this is a common sort of revelation for token side characters.

Ako’s insight, however, is not quite so simple. Through her role in the story, she brings into scrutiny the very idea of the “side” or “minor” character. She’s of little immediate importance to the central plot — she says so herself — but the plot of Negima! is rarely straightforward; most often, major plot arcs resolve when a handful of minor plots converge into a volatile skein. What would happen if one of these component sequences of events played out differently? At no point does Negima! presume that minor characters aren’t important (how could it, when it has so many of them?).

Normally I’d be inclined to say that the question of major/minor depends on point of view. If we accept Negi as the main character insofar as we most often see things from his general perspective, then Ako would be fairly minor, given that we’d probably use Asuna as our example of a major secondary character simply because she’s the most obvious. It’s difficult to establish that as a standard, however, as point of view in Negima! tends to be unreliable. The designated POV character switches more often than is convenient to count — and if the major/minor character paradigm is tied to point of view, it rearranges itself entirely with each of these shifts. And anyway, we can’t write off examples of similar media in which the point-of-view character is very pointedly not the “main” character as such (Haibane Renmei comes to mind), which at the very least complicate how character relationships affect the model.

It’d probably be easier to illustrate where I’m going with this if we walk through a few Ako segments. We may as well start with the school festival, when Ako, who has developed a crush on Nagi (presumably Negi’s cousin; actually Negi after age-progression magic), runs into the man-child himself, and brings her various insecurities with her.

Because you really should read the rest of it yourself if you haven’t already, let’s jump right into the end of chapter 122.

You know the drill — Ako, being more or less underconfident, flees in horror from the dressing room (she, uh, puts a shirt on first). Cue self-conscious teenage girl mode!

I have two things in mind right now that are almost too obvious to mention, but I’ll mention them anyway. The first, from the two-page spread above, is when Ako asks no one in particular for help, and Negi appears, which is ironic and yet somehow not. It depends on how much anime and manga we’ve consumed, and how we define irony, maybe, but it isn’t especially unexpected. Were it a real-life situation, we might’ve laughed at the odds of Negi showing up at just that conveniently inopportune moment, but in terms of the genres of fiction to which Negima! belongs, it’s one of the more natural things that could’ve happened. If we read it as postmodern metafiction, postmodern irony is subverted or avoided.

Annoyingly, though, postmodernism devouring itself ouroboros-style is very postmodern. And it may simply be ironic in the first place that we wouldn’t find irony in the situation at first glance. I’ll get you next time, postmodernism! Next time!

The second item of note is Ako’s scar, which, while itself visually prominent, could stand for any number of defects both external and internal that relegate characters to minor-dom. That’s misleading, actually, insofar as some of them aren’t what we’d call “defects” at all. For example, there was a time when Jews could aspire to no greater status than minor character in Western literature. Jewish women (and, I think, dark-colored women in general) were under no circumstances considered for One True Pairing — and as if that wasn’t enough, they tended to be written as promiscuous, “ruined” rape victims, or both (I don’t hate you, Ivanhoe, but…). I doubt a whole slew of contemporary readers would call Judaism a flaw, but that’s the point; what is a flaw? Isn’t it a matter of perspective, a character trait we personally don’t like? And if the core characters of a given story are flawless for all practical purposes, wouldn’t that simply render them lacking in character²? Of course, low mimetic and ironic heroes make realistic fiction what it is, so it’s a passe question if you’re at all familiar with that genre (and I’d be skeptical if you said you weren’t), but contemporary speculative fiction seems to be where Mary Sue fled when the mainstream voted her out, and she has quite a foothold in shounen manga and its derivatives.

I’m sure there’s something to be said here for the expression of social constructs — Ako notes that men especially would value her lower for her potentially unsightly physical feature — but I’m really not the one to ask about that. Besides, Negi (and Kotaro, too) isn’t especially concerned with it; the society of magi, like the society of the Host Club, is perhaps more silent role model than outspoken commentator (or the former renders it the latter). At any rate Negi swoops in and, in what he assumes to be a teacherly gesture, ferries Ako several hours into the past to ensure that she doesn’t miss her concert. He also takes her on a date.

Oh, Negi…if only you knew what we know.

The context here is that they’ve entered…I guess it’s a beauty pageant, technically. A couples beauty pageant. Perhaps Negi’s oblivious to Ako’s insecurity (which isn’t unlikely), or perhaps he’s acting deliberately, but he doesn’t validate her underconfidence by acknowledging it directly. That’s one way of addressing the issue, anyway. I wonder if another character (Madoka? Haruna?) might’ve gone the route of saying her feelings aren’t invalid insofar as feelings are validated by being felt, or host no validity variable.

Well, alright — Negi does acknowledge Ako’s physical insecurity during the swimsuit round. It’s possible that the pair’s conservative dress costs them first place. Maybe the point here is that Ako’s worries are valid from a certain perspective — there surely exist men who would find her scar off-putting — but she’s surrounded by people around whom she needn’t worry, and who won’t turn away from her because she worries.

And, what’s more, she isn’t bound to accept a point of view that doesn’t accept her. After all…

To be all Sartre about it, she’s condemned to freedom. Freedom from constructs like “supporting role” is a part of it — of course she isn’t really free insofar as she’s a fictional character, but Akamatsu does have a way of treating several members of his support cast as “main” when their turns come up. The idea is that Ako, being herself, doesn’t have the luxury of falling back on an excuse like “supporting role,” as only she can be her main character. Every character could be a main character; it just so happens that, in a given story, most of them aren’t. There’s no good way of avoiding that, but at least Akamatsu tries a few maneuvers. Negima! gives the impression of concerted effort aimed at making as many characters as possible as interesting and relevant as possible. One-dimensional stock characters don’t really have a place here; in true Akamatsu fashion, the recurring characters left undeveloped are at least quite weird³.

Basically, the problem with Ako is that she won’t accept her human agency, and the problem with minor characters in the genres upon which Negima! comments is that they’re often not enabled to do so. Negi isn’t the kind of hero who boldly, phallocentrically shoulders the worries of frail damsels in distress; he’s an existential enabler. He brought the same sort of passive aid to bear with Nodoka and Yue, you may recall, but Ako’s seizing of her own destiny is more of a sweeping gesture due to her self-reference.

(I’m sure there’s more to be gleaned from Ako’s role in the magic world arc, but I think of that as a separate phase of her character, if that makes sense. Another post, perhaps!)

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Endnotes

¹I’m led to believe these artists and writers aren’t familiar with people like Les Claypool and Victor Wooten, but then those two are among a handful of anomalies.

Also, I can think of maybe one exception to that rule, but Haruko never really plays the thing.

²Which isn’t to say that characters (even main ones) who lack human traits don’t have their uses in fiction, but that’s one digression I’ll avoid for now. Consider also that lack of flaws may be a flaw, depending on how you look at it.

³I’d call the villains a little flat, but most of them seem to embody some hentai fetish or another. I mean, goo girls? Seriously?

Tags: irony, mahou sensei negima!, metafiction, postmodernism

Thus spake Pontifus on Tuesday, 21 July 2009 at 8:00 pm, and Manga expanded tenfold. Become privy to further discussion on the matter via RSS 2.0. You might grace us with a brilliant comment, or trackback from a distant podium.