Scans_Daily

The Witch from Mercury, first Gundam tv series with a female protagonist, is coming to an end – the final episode will be aired next Sunday (at the time of writing). The series met with international acclaim and is rightly compared to Revolutionary Girl Utena, a series whose literary adaptation was the debut work of the director and writer of Witch, Ichiro Okouchi. I highly recommend all versions of Utena, it’s among the finest pieces of popculture created in contemporary Japan, but this time I would like to talk about Mr. Okouchi’s earlier adventure into real robot genre, Code Geass. I’ll be talking about themes of the anime as well as what I loved and what I disliked about it, as well as intoducing various comics adaptations. It is the kind of a story where an in-depth look requires discussion of various events far into the storyline, as it has plenty of plot twists changing the meaning of several scenes and plotlines. So, spoilers!

The simplest way to describe Code Geass is to say it’s a Gundam story told from the perspective of a Char Enzable analogue by the way of Death Note with plentiful of Author’s Barely Disguised Fetishes. If you do not have background in anime, it can also be described as a massively complex shakespearean tragedy of revange set to the backdrop of an alternate history Japan conquered by a massively technologically advanced version of British Empire. The plot is very complex, and honestly needlessly complicated by the time we reach the middle of the story, so I do not recommend it as your first anime. In fact, I wouldn’t recommend it if you are used to PG rated shoujo and shounen either. Plenty of story elements and character archetypes in the series exist as conversation with earlier anime series, and the story loves deconstructing and rebuilding every trope it gets its hand on. You can find detailed setting and plot descriptions for example on Wikipedia. Now onto my subjective opinion and reading of the stories.

Danmei is a Chinese genre equivalent to Japanese Tanbi, gay romance stories portraying characters and relationships adhering to traditional East Asian cultures and aesthetics rather than Western ones. A danmei story can belong to any medium or have any genre crossover, but most successful ones tend to start as web novels, usually published on Jinjiang Literature City. A frequent crossover is xianxia danmei, stories set in a pseudohistorical fantastic China inspired by traditional Chinese religions, mythologies and beliefs. The more popular ones also tend to gain a manhua (comic) adaptation sooner or later. The most popular ones also tend to have a large amount of horror and subversive themes, fittingly distrustful of authorities - technically Danmei is illegal in China and at least one author, rumoured to be Mo Xiang Tong Xiu, has been arrested and released on bail after spending more than a year in jail. This doesn’t stop Jinjiang from making many censored live action dramas based on their properties, obviously without the original creators ever seeing a single yuan. (It is however worth mentioning that animated (donghua) and comic adaptations tend to be more faithful towards the source material, with the creators conweying the forbidden romantic plots via body language of the characters). Let me introduce my favourite horror stories.