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!)

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?

Breaking into the super robot genre has proven difficult for me, so I asked the wise OGT to point me toward a few shows that might help. Among other things, he recommended Gunbuster (aka Top wo Nerae!) — you may already know this, given all the fanboying I did over the show and its sequel. Gunbuster was probably just the sort of thing I needed, tempered as it is by enough drama and pain to sustain my interest through the genuinely awesome moments, which I can in fact enjoy on the level of genuine awesome if I stay interested long enough.

Diebuster, though.

You want to put it into words. You really try. But the last episode explodes your mind, and you’re left with assorted pieces, slightly charred, floating through space. You could leave it at that, but these pieces practically beg to be reassembled, and I’m nothing if not tenacious when it comes to weaving my webs.

So this is a post about Diebuster, ostensibly. But where to begin? “At the beginning,” some would no doubt suggest, but that’s part of the problem: the story’s structure resists that sensible impulse. It’s vexing now that I’m trying to put my thoughts in order, but it’s not something a first-time viewer would notice early on — the beginning seems just fine, and it is, in more ways than are evident from the beginning.

If that makes little sense, you can blame Diebuster’s unusual structure. Things we see in the beginning are parts of larger things that aren’t evident until later; crucially relevant information is withheld. Open an image in your favorite image editor, zoom in as far as you can, and then zoom out slowly, and you’ll get the idea. We could call it “revelation,” but it’s more ubiquitous than a series of run-of-the-mill reveals — plot, characters, setting, et al. (or, specifically, our perception of them, which is what matters anyway) are affected across the board, enmeshed as they are in a structure that’s heavily reliant on strategic obscurity and the unexpected.

It’s atypical, perhaps, but not unique, or even especially new; eighty or so years earlier, the same technique saw use by (you guessed it) James Joyce, particularly in Ulysses¹. Joyce scholar Fritz Senn calls it “circumdation:”

In [Ulysses's] first chapter we will figure out, not in the conventional, expositional order, but by circumstantial links, the setting on top of a historical tower, somewhere near Dublin, at a certain time. The last two chapters, “Ithaca” and “Penelope,” above all put much of what we had taken for granted into a different light. Adjustment takes patience and circumspection, many retracings in an Odyssean progression of trial and error… As often as not we may still be waiting for the final, redeeming “circumdet” that makes everything fall into line.²

It must be said that Diebuster is more comprehensible the first time through than Ulysses. Still, if you compared the point-by-point, beginning-to-end analyses of a first-time viewer and a second-time viewer, you may not find much middle ground. I’ve watched bits and pieces of earlier episodes after finishing the show, and the experience was quite different the second time around, relatively speaking; given how much we learn about Nono, the Topless, the space monsters, and the universe itself along the way, and how much of that information is the sort that’s probably evident to the characters all along even if we aren’t aware of it, the second viewing produces constructs of meaning vastly different from the first. Many stories (maybe all stories) have this quality to some degree, but Diebuster has it in spades — again, it shapes the story’s very momentum.

Since I’ve ended up on the topic of second viewing anyway, consider the first episode on rewatch. We know of Nono’s identity; much of what she does makes a new sort of sense, or assumes altered significance. We know that Lal’c, with all of her baggage (of which we also know), is responsible for the brief voice-over during the opening moments, and we’ve heard the complementary voice-over in episode 6. We know the basis of Tycho’s attitude toward Lal’c. We know more about the antagonists, about the setting, about practically everything. It seems, to me at least, a more profound change in experience than that brought about by simply knowing what will happen in future episodes.

With that said, circumdation isn’t specifically a process that takes place between viewings; it happens all along, and forces us to question our assumptions even during the first viewing. We’re kept on our toes, made to disassemble initial conclusions, insert new information, and reconstruct them as best we can, all while processing plot developments which, in six episodes, don’t have time to pause and give us a breather. It results in a very active, almost hectic reading process — I enjoy it, usually, though I wonder if this would be a basis of complaint for some viewers.

The effect is most evident in later episodes, when revelatory events invoke broad re-imaginings — episode four in particular comes to mind, and the sixth episode affirms that Diebuster’s circumdative nature can reach even Gunbuster, if we let it. Being a matter of basic structure, however, it’s present all along. In the first episode, for example, we aren’t even certain of the setting (that is, Mars) until the latter third or so, when it’s announced outright. Consider the screencaps above, both from the beginning; the predominance of blue, the snow, and the rustic nature of the houses are all deceptive. As the episode progresses, yellow and red come to dominate the palette, technology becomes more evident, and we might, if we’re perceptive, “figure out” (as Senn says) “not in the conventional, expositional order, but by circumstantial links, the setting.” Appropriately enough, the reveal itself takes the form of a literal zoom-out.

Now, I do enjoy examining structure, probably more than I enjoy examining socio-culturo-historico-things in the usual way. But structural nuances, I must admit after a thousand-odd words about them, are not much of a starting point, which is to say that my thoughts on a story don’t begin with the specifics of its twists and turns. Customarily, I’ll try to attach broad identifiers to a thing, but Diebuster even makes that difficult — about which I am thrilled, as any excuse to combine Northrop Frye and mad speculation is a good one.

Diebuster is a mecha show, certainly. It might be postmodern, though I suspect it takes that half-step beyond that hints at postmodernism’s relevance having begun its slow death. Terms like “mecha” and “postmodern,” however, are narrower than the identifiers I have in mind — namely, Frye’s modes and mythoi. It’s possible that these terms are too restrictively Aristotelian; it’s also possible that, when these terms no longer serve our needs as-is (which isn’t necessarily the case, mind you), it’s time to play around with them, and you should know by now that nothing is sacred when I wield my Unlimited Interpretation Works.

We can say one thing with some certainty: Diebuster has irony. I don’t claim that it falls within the range of Frye’s ironic mode (I would’ve said it is ironic); it may, but I’m not yet certain of that. I simply mean that Diebuster is bursting with ironic elements, things that aren’t what they seem they normally would or should be and situations that play out in unexpected ways. Given circumdation, the very structure itself is ironic; one might say irony is its gimmick. And the characters — really, if you’ve seen Diebuster, I doubt I need to explain how the Topless are atypical super robot pilots. Consider Casio, who, despite his hanging around and offering words of wisdom where needed, essentially quit the mecha business out of fear, or Nicola, who, lacking any direction of his own, just rolls with whatever life throws at him. Tycho and Lal’c aren’t what you’d call paragons of awesome, either, until Nono teaches them how to be. And if you figured out what Nono is before the reveal in episode four, you’re probably superhuman, as it’s really just ridiculous (in a good way).

It’s possible, if we’re going with a descriptor that consists of mode and mythos (and we are, because I like to), that Diebuster is “ironic irony,” that it meets the conditions of the ironic mode (the work deals with characters presented as “below” the reader in situation or surroundings) and the ironic branch of the Mythos of Winter (the work applies myth conventions and storytelling methods new and old to realistic, recognizable situations). The latter is likely accurate; despite their capabilities and their surroundings, the Topless are all too human in their mannerisms and conflicts (perhaps it’s the effect of realism on familiar tropes that gives irony its unpredictable nature to begin with). But are they ironic characters in the modal sense? They do, after all, still have those capabilities, and they still inhabit those surroundings; the basic conditions under which their humanity takes place are unfamiliar to us. Consider the climax, during which, for a brief period, the laws of the physical universe don’t apply to Nono at all. Mode-wise, it’s almost mythological.

That in itself isn’t mind-blowing. I’ll borrow Cuchlann’s lovingly hand-crafted illustration:

It’s reasonable to imagine the modes as a cycle, and even Frye speculated in the Anatomy of Criticism that the literature of his time showed signs of moving away from irony and toward myth and romance, citing science fiction specifically. We could stick Diebuster somewhere between irony and myth, and label it transitional, and I’d be okay with that. But something deep in the untamed wilds of my mind insists that there must be more to it than that, that I shouldn’t be so quick to concede to Frye’s cycle as is. It almost feels as though we’re missing something.

Consider the relationship between contemporary “myth” and what we usually think of as myth, stories of gods and heroes and such. Both are basically myth, in Fryean terms, as both involve characters who surpass human beings in kind; whether we’re talking about Zeus or Buster Machine No. 7, we’re dealing with characters whose means fall beyond the comprehension of the humans below them. Those humans may possess the fantastical powers of the romantic mode, but they’re still human, literally speaking, and their abilities, however potent, cannot match those of the myth-figures present.

There is, however, one key difference between mythic paragons old and new. The former are made by older deities, generally, elsewise they simply are. In the beginning, there was Oceanus and Tethys, or Chronos, or Chaos, or Muspell and its guardian Surt, or God who created the heavens and the earth; these deities oversee the creation of other deities (when they allow other deities to exist), the processes of which don’t involve human beings much at all. But consider our alleged contemporary mythology. Nono is a war machine built by humans, one imbued with human-like intelligence and emotion. The Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann is raw human potential made manifest. In Dan Simmons’s Hyperion Cantos, those we see gain power over time and space are either human or human-made. In Stranger in a Strange Land, Valentine Michael Smith leverages Martian wisdom with his humanity to reach his state of godliness. The difference, then: we, humans, make the gods — sometimes we are the gods. I don’t believe that’s something we can ignore.

We might call this strategic use of the unexpected, irony in the vein of this ironic age. Or we might not; I’m not sure that it’s expected or unexpected, if that makes any sense. It’s simply a fictional truth that continues to appear in the fiction (especially the science fiction) I consume. It’s not even especially surprising; irony has primed me and others to accept that God is dead, disinterested, or irrelevant, that there is no concrete meaning of life, and that, subsequently, we’re free to fill the meaning-void with whatever meaning we choose, as soon as we stop moping about there being no meaning in the first place (did I mention I usually don’t like postmodernism?). We are creators, in that sense; Heinlein’s aforementioned Stranger in a Strange Land presents that idea with little distillation. It’s as if we’ve been getting it wrong all along — rather than products of gods, we are fledgling gods ourselves. Thou art God, as it were. Please continue being a Messiah.

I’m not claiming that’s a fact of the natural universe, or even that the idea’s increasing presence in narrative art is evidence of some deep awareness of the idea on our collective part (realistically I might suggest the latter, but that’d make this post much longer than it is already, and I don’t want that). I am claiming that what Frye had in mind when he outlined the mythic mode…

If superior in kind both to other men and to the environment of other men, the hero is a divine being, and the story about him will be a myth in the common sense of a story about a god. Such stories have an important place in literature, but are as a rule found outside the normal literary categories.³

…may not describe satisfyingly or with suitable accuracy our new mythology, which, given that, may not be mythology at all. It is at the very least a mythology informed by our having written our way through the entirety of Frye’s cycle and emerged from irony intact, one which acknowledges that, even when gods grow beyond our ability to control, they wouldn’t exist at all if not for us — even from works in which gods exist literally, such as Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods, and (since this is basically an anime blog, after all) Kannagi, we often get the sense that a god’s power depends in whole or large part on the devotion of its followers. Either we are gods, or we inflict them upon the universe — the two may be basically the same thing. Perhaps, if we’re going to keep the cycle of modes, we should accommodate expansion, turn it into a spiral whose size reflects the experience we accumulate as we travel the modes.

Or perhaps we must acknowledge that the cycle is a result of our oversimplification of an amalgam of modes with no clear demarcations between them. “Fictions,” says Frye, “may be classified…by the hero’s power of action, which may be greater than ours, less, or roughly the same⁴” — but what if, in fiction, our power of action knows no bounds, or if an apparently mythic hero’s power of action is no more or less than what we “mere” humans decide it is? Perhaps we haven’t come full circle, so to speak, but have integrated all modes known thus far into our understanding, in a linear progression — and if that’s the case, what undiscovered modes lie ahead? What happens when self-aware gods write stories about themselves?

Endnotes

¹Not that Joyce invented it singlehandedly, but, to my knowledge, he refined it into something like what we experience in Diebuster. Even very old literature relies on the withholding of information from the audience, but, in this case (and in the case of Ulysses), it’s synonymous with the narrative structure itself, which offers understanding slowly as a series of junctures which broaden setting and characters in steps.

²Senn, Fritz. “Anagnostic Probes.” Joyce, Modernity, and Its Mediation. Ed. Christine van Boheemen. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1989: 40, 44.

³Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000: 33.

⁴Ibid.