Here’s some like/(enjoy/appreciate) for you: I’m still reading Octave (a recommendation via TheBigN) even though it makes me feel terribly uncomfortable. So it must be doing something right.
But what might that be?
This panel is a good place to start. It’s not as if public communication is entirely prudish; our media give us stories about sex, we have to put up with shady periodicals whose writers devote their lives to unearthing the sex lives of celebrities, and so on. This is usually glamorous, idealized sex. But what we don’t want to know is what it’s like when the married couple next door gets it on, or what our friends did with their significant others last night. This isn’t glamorous. This is real people screwing, and it isn’t interesting so much as embarrassing and awkward insofar as it’s private. I’m assuming that most of us live in a place where it isn’t generally acceptable to go around explaining how you did x to y last night.
This is what Octave does. It gives us characters who are remarkable in their mundanity, who aren’t even especially likable in and of themselves, and makes us watch them fuck. And “make love,” too, but we see the fucking first.
It feels like picking someone at random from a crowd, following them home, and watching from the closet while they (re-)consummate the relationship of their choice. It feels like voyeurism; it feels like you, the reader, really shouldn’t be present through all this. Hell, it feels that way when the characters aren’t screwing, when they’re just fretting over the problem of how to carve a niche for oneself in a society that doesn’t care much about You the Individual. These are the kinds of things we deliberately don’t tell people about.
Octave is about a former teen idol struggling to make a living in Tokyo who, by chance, meets a freelance composer in a laundromat. Freelance composer uses former teen idol for sex. Relationship ensues. And of course this is an atypical love story in that this is the kind of thing that actually happens, in many cases.
The delivery is all over the place, too, throughout the first few chapters. Disorientation seems to be the dominant narrative philosophy. It doesn’t feel good, no, but it’s actually executed rather well, I think; as the manga progresses, things pan out, begin to flow and cohere and make more sense. It may be the nearest thing to literary stream of consciousness I’ve seen in manga (whether by design or creative accident matters little to me).
What we’re given, then, amounts to a series of private moments in the life of a rather neurotic protagonist. It’s really terrible to watch; it’s the kind of thing we’re likely to read manga to escape. But there’s something about it…something that keeps me reading, anyway.
It certainly isn’t any particular affection on my part for the characters; while I don’t hate any of them, I wouldn’t exactly want to befriend most of them, either. I’m probably fascinated by the narrative technique, to a degree; you may know how easily I’m won over by that sort of thing. But it must be said that, uncomfortable as it is, I do consider the story genuinely good. Happy moments occur throughout, and these are made all the more satisfying by what the characters (and the reader!) have to endure to reach them — and for all of Yukino’s infuriating qualities, I find it difficult not to care about her many, varied problems. If Octave makes you squirm (and, who knows, it may not), at least it makes an effort at rewarding your perseverance.
And, anyway, if we find ourselves trapped among the sexual artifices of the mass media, and unable to discuss sex in the most real terms — well, maybe that’s where fiction comes in.
One of my high school English teachers once said that good literature doesn’t make things easy for you; good literature disorients, confuses, and otherwise makes the reader uncomfortable. And, while I’ve always been skeptical of statements that take the form “good literature does [x/not x]” (even if I, er, make such claims), somehow that notion has stuck with me. So I suppose that, at the end of the day, I have to respect Octave for troubling the waters a little.
Pontifus
kaiserpingvin
cuchlann
Shance
TheKittymeister
r042
ghostlightning
/ 6 May 2010Not really looking for new stuff to read right now, but you’ve made a very annoyingly compelling case.
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TheBigN
/ 7 May 2010Just as planned. >:D
Pontifus
/ 7 May 2010Yes, this.
kaei
/ 6 May 2010So how do you usually feel about characters in manga having sex – do you have the same response, feeling like a voyeur in their lives? If not, is it because the Octave characters are sketched so realistically that you can totally imagine them living just next door to you, which causes the voyeuristic aspect?
Not really looking for a serious answer – just that you managed to verbalise what I was unable about this series – that it makes me feel vaguely dirty and uncomfortable for reasons I couldn’t describe.
Pontifus
/ 7 May 2010No, this response is specific to Octave. It’s not only that the characters feel so real; it’s that the volume of relatively mundane incidents in their day-to-day lives makes me feel as though I’ve sneaked behind the scenes of the usual manga plot, into the realm of things that happen when the characters aren’t “on screen,” so to speak — not to mention that the things we see here are simply things people tend not to talk about when they’re effecting their public personae. It’s not just the sex that makes me feel like a voyeur, in this case. But the way that Octave handles sex — simply as something people do — sets it apart from the usual manga treatment that renders sexual situations pornographic, humorous, or both.
TheBigN
/ 7 May 2010For me, the focus on Octave is not the sex, but on how the relationship is set up (and I agree that it’s more realistically done than most), and on Yukino’s struggles to feel comfortable with herself, which is definitely something that all of us hang onto as well. You can’t help but feel for her as she stumbles her way through her relationship with someone who really cares for her to the point where it feels like she’s dreaming sometimes. I do enjoy the frank discussions on the amorphous nature of sexuality as well, which is something that I don’t think a lot of places want to touch.
Pontifus
/ 7 May 2010I do feel like the sex is consequent to the relationship dynamics, but that’s what makes it work as it does. It doesn’t feel like fanservice; it feels like real, honest-to-God sex, and that renders Octave quite a bit more mature than most “mature” manga I’ve read.
TheBigN
/ 7 May 2010This too, which is another one of the things that I like about it.
lelangir
/ 9 May 2010They’re doing a good job of setting up a huge giant Yukino failure. I sense she’s gonna come tumbling down soon. And then Setsuko’s gonna lose it :(
It feels like the manga is trying to screw with the reader somehow, by pitting Setsuko with Yukino. Yukino is this bumbling idiot while Setsuko, while she can be vulnerable….she still doesn’t seem totally open to the viewer. She’s too cool.
Pontifus
/ 10 May 2010This is what I’m afraid of. There are times when Yukino seems like precisely the wrong kind of person for Setsuko, who isn’t quite as cool as she lets on. In retrospect, I wonder if her initial act of seduction was less her getting what she wanted regardless of the consequences and more a moment of weakness on her part, or a failure of her self-control. Either way, we can see as things move along that Yukino’s particular brand of fail is especially potent vs. Setsuko, and this is troubling because there’s no doubting that Yukino will continue to fail for a while before things get better.
ayame
/ 9 March 2012Ok, now you got me interested in finishing Octave. Its moeness and not so interesting start made me drop it at first. But I’ll try again :)
Pontifus
/ 9 March 2012Octave is really about as un-moe as it gets — one of its big themes is making life decisions based on reality rather than preconceptions. It never does become particularly fast-paced, but do give it a few chapters.
ayame
/ 10 March 2012The design is undoubtly moe, though. And I’m not action-thirsty. It was just the theme of idols that I usually don’t take weel, plus the design… but I’ll give it another try :)
Pontifus
/ 10 March 2012I know there’s not always a lot that people can do about their preferences and gut reactions, but I think you’ll find in this case that the moe-looking character designs are subverted. This is not the idealized idol story; this is pretty much what actually happens to teen idols later in life. It can be pretty grim, actually, so be sure you’re in the mood for that.