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The "Good" Guys




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Princess_Irene
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PostPosted: Sun Aug 26, 2012 10:23 am Reply with quote
As I was (finally) getting caught up in One Piece, I was struck by how I found myself cheering on the pirates during the Paramount War arc. At first this seemed perfectly reasonable - after all, the pirates are the protagonists of the series, right? But as the arc neared its conclusion, I was reminded that to the rest of the story's world (as of this point), the pirates were the bad guys. So was I, in effect, cheering on the villains?

Taking this a step further, I realized that this is something fairly common in and at the same time something that sets it apart from the basic superhero tale in American comics (I'm talking about Marvel and DC, rather than something like Watchmen), a moral conundrum usually left to what we think of as more "serious literature" in the west. The classic example is of course Magic Knight Rayearth, where the spoiler[ending reveals that the Knights have been, essentially, on the wrong side,] but it's hardly the only one. Romance manga (specifically shoujo) continually encourage us to root for the character who might otherwise be termed the "bad guy" simply because he's who the heroine is crushing on, and stories like Puella Magi Madoka Magica keep us guessing as to the truth of what is good and bad.

So my question is this - what series blur the line between hero and villain? How is manga in a position to make us question those distinctions, and are there any authors who do it especially well? We've previously discussed rape vs romance in this forum - where else do authors ask us to change around our points of view, either in a positive or negative way?
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Alan45
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PostPosted: Sun Aug 26, 2012 10:50 am Reply with quote
Techinically all super heroes are "bad" guys. They are not duly authorized law enforcement agents and are exacting private justice, a big no, no under the law.

I think in MKR that you could argue that they were working on behalf of the "good" guys. Even the good guys don't always know the end result of their actions.

As to your basic question: most of the action stuff, even fist fights are frowned on by the authorities and by normal society. For titles, Jormungund- wepons dealers, Black Lagoon- organized and disorganized crime, Tenjo Tenge- juvenile deliquents with a private war. An lot of shonen manga qualifies. You tend to leave reality at the first page.
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Princess_Irene
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PostPosted: Sun Aug 26, 2012 12:32 pm Reply with quote
Alan45 wrote:
You tend to leave reality at the first page.


An excellent point. Laughing

I was thinking more of the fact that the story rarely allows us to recognize the fact that we're following the so-called bad guys - Black Lagoon, for example, shows us repeatedly that the crew acts viciously, but when you compare them to who they are fighting against, they come off looking better. The same holds true for the pirates of One Piece.
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Alan45
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PostPosted: Sun Aug 26, 2012 1:27 pm Reply with quote
Oh, I agree. Take Initial D the whole thing is about street racing. One of the extras in Tokyo Pops abysmal anime version had someone actually driving one of the real mountain passes. The authorities had installed speed bumps to stop the real racers. In one of the later volumes of the manga, Ry Takahashi wins because he is comfortable driving into a blind curve on the wrong side of the road and his opponent isn't. We are cheering for Ry since he is one of the "good" guys, but think about what he is doing.

I tried to come up with titles that take place in (sorta) the real world. In fantasy settings, it is a bit murkier who is good and who is bad. Mostly us against them. As far as romance is concerned, while I like the genre, I simply refuse to read anything that confuses sex and violence.
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zawa113



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PostPosted: Sun Aug 26, 2012 3:34 pm Reply with quote
I think Banana Fish does this at times. Yes, the bad guys are clearly bad guys (and child rapists among other terrible things), but our main hero is a gang leader. And has killed people. So when halfway through the series spoiler[when he is critically injured and fighting for his life in the hospital], we're reminded that Ash isn't necessarily a good guy either when the general population's opinion on him is "why are they trying so hard for him? He's killed people!", and no, it doesn't really matter that much of it was in self defence (not that they would know that), to the general population, Ash is definitely not a good guy. Much of the time, I don't even think Ash considers himself to be a good guy either, even if he's clearly not the big bad (who, naturally, have lots of political stuff backing them so they appear not evil)

Mushishi is another example, many of the mushi themselves are neither good nor evil, even when they clearly have negative effects on the humans they might've kinda attached to. But the mushi never seem to do anything with any sort of malice. It's probably why Ginko usually feels bad eradicating them.

Pet Shop of Horrors is another. Yes, Count D usually sells people gremlins, but much of the time, they only become gremlins because Count D sells pets to clearly irresponsible people as a lesson. Thus, when the gremlins go out of control (and usually end up dead), it's usually more the fault of the careless owner. Granted, Count D shouldn't be such a reckless jerk with pet distribution.

Many chapters of the Phoenix saga tend to have blurred good guys. The Karma chapter for example, has two artists, one who, as a result of an accident, lost one of his arms at birth and has kinda killed a bunch of people. One day, he meets the other sculptor on a bridge and stabs his good arm, rendering him useless as an artist. Over time, the killer becomes gentle and the kind artist becomes willing to do anything to preserve his title as "best sculptor", and obviously the two meet again. By the time they do, it's tough to tell who the good guy should be.
Then, in the Sun chapter, it starts off with a near-royalty sort of guy getting his face peeled off by the enemy, and for some reason they decide to put a wolf's head on him and it takes to his flesh and becomes his new face/head. No, I don't know how that works either. Whatever. The point is, it lets him see the wolf deities of the village that he eventually winds up at. But the village is trying to be dominated by the spread of Buddhism (rather violently). I won't spoil much more than that, as it's well worth the read (if you can't find the manga, it was adapted very well in the 2004 series that you can get all of for like $15), but this brings the question of if one religion can truly ever be considered "the good guy" so to say.
Tezuka likes to do this a lot, many chapters of Black Jack end very ambiguously, and there's this whole ambiguous thing with Black Jack's nemesis: the guy who does lethal injection mercy kills. Astro Boy has many "robot vs human" things, which ranges from robots taking human jobs and humans being anti-robot to "yeah, we totally need them, but we don't like them". And the Blue Knight and Atlas usually make Astro question robots vs humans thing, as robots are generally treated very poorly by most humans and the Blue Knight is fighting for robot rights, even if it means injuring humans to do so. Yes, Astro is pretty much always seen as the good guy, it's the bad guys who confuse the hell out of the viewer in awesome ways (I think the 2003 series does this especially well). Yep, Tezuka is definitely the way to go, it's part of why I like him so much!
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NeburPT



Joined: 22 Mar 2012
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PostPosted: Sun Aug 26, 2012 5:20 pm Reply with quote
While most of the seinen I read has blurred lines between who or what is "bad" or "good" (Bokurano, Gantz, Vagabond, etc. - even Pluto is ambiguous) so that you can't clearly distinguish or even have the chance to root for one side, I'm going to point out Blade of the Immortal and Dorohedoro as two examples where you can take the "bad guys" side in some cases.

Starting with Blade of the Immortal, on the one side you have the protagonists Manji and Rin, Manji being an immortal swordsman that has killed 100 police officers after rebelling against his master and who is now seeking redemption for his crimes, and Rin being a teenage girl that hires Manji as a bodyguard to find and punish her parents murderers, the Itto-tyu.

The Itto-ryu are a group of rogue swordsmen headed by Anotsu Kagehisa who are willing to take other dojos by force and kill when needed to impose their philosophy and unify the other schools under their banner. Being dispersed all over the country and having all kinds of people under their ranks, while having their share of amoral sociopaths in the first few volumes (Kuroi Sabatto, the mask seller...), they also have conflicted and deeper personalities like Magatsu, who leaves the gang but returns due to his loyalty towards Anotsu; Makie, who has a troubled past and has difficulty in acknowledging her skills with the sword; or the leader himself, who meets with Rin on various occasions and leaves her with very conflicted feelings about her revenge.

There is also a third party in the form of the government's forces, lead by Habaki Kagimura and his group of soldiers, who, instead of embodying the law, actually experiment on human prisoners in order to find the truth about Manji's immortality and "hire" a truly despicable psychopath named Shira, who is actually the most "evil" and irredeemable character in the manga, to hunt and kill Anotsu.

Regarding Dorohedoro, it's a really peculiar manga with a dark sense of humour and some of the "villains" are more loveable losers than anything else, like the pair Ebisu/Fujita, with their legendary bad luck and failed schemes. Others, like Shin and Noi, while they can be ruthless, also have a great chemistry together and are shown not to blindly follow orders.

I also have to point out Death Note, as sometimes I would side with Kira just for seeing how he would get out of the next situation he got himself into and actually outsmart and manipulate his adversaries. Twisted Evil
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littlegreenwolf



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PostPosted: Sun Aug 26, 2012 7:45 pm Reply with quote
Naruto played with this from the very beginning to the point I found it endearing to find all this philosophy working their way into a kids manga. Every bad guy had a back-story showing he didn't usually start out bad, and some of them were downright tragic. Naruto at some point realizes that he is essentially a weapon, and that he can either stop being a ninja, or he can try changing what is expected of a ninja, so he makes it his goal to change it for everyone so everyone can just stop killing each other.

Bad guys become some of his best friends (like Garaa) and others like Sasuke come to the revelation that his brother wasn't exactly as evil and deserving of death as he thought. Themes like Revenge brings you nothing, no one wins in war, and you can make friends of anyone are constant, and I like that even when the non-stop fighting in the manga chapter after chapter take over again. There's also the revelation that Naruto's home village is not a nice happy peaceful place and that other countries/villages have suffered because of them, and that others consider Naruto and any other leaf ninja, bad guys.

CLAMP as you mentioned played with this in Rayearth, but if you look at most of their early manga, they play with this as a serious plot twist. Tokyo Baby, and especially X was nothing but are they good, are they bad, who's right? Is it right to save the world by destroying humanity? RG Veda played with it as well with Ashura's alter ego being essentially a war god delights in death and destruction making the cute little kid the heroes of the manga started out with trying to save being something they had to in the end try and kill.

And it started out as a book series, and was more successful as an anime than a manga, but it had one as well so I'll point out Kino's Journey. Kino's Journey was basically about the flaws of humanity, but every time she went into a new village you were wondering if that sweet person was really so sweet, or if that bad guy had some reasoning behind what they did.

In shoujo, I've grown out of love with her stuff over the years, but a lot of Kaori Yuki's stuff, especially Angel Santuary had the same sort of theme. It's a long epic story about a way between heaven and hell and you'd think heaven would be the good guys, but you're rooting for hell mostly. There's a lot of an anti-hero in Kaori Yuki's other series, Count Cain/God Child character with Cain.

And then Please Save My Earth anyone?

But this isn't just something that I find unique to manga, or even standout with the medium. It's a story device that in my opinion is pretty much essential for me to really like enjoy a story. If you don't have a bad guy who has some depth to them have depth to them, it usually bored me. If you can make me cheer for them at some point, you're brilliant.

Take Sirius Snape for example, and how Rowling ended up making James Potter a huge bully. YA literature seems to usually follow a simple black and white formula, but I find the best stories I like outside of the genre are ones that are all grey. The stories where an author starts out with characters I love and hate, and by the end of it all I find I hate the ones I started out loving and love the ones I originally hated. For a prime example I'll just point to the now more widely known Game of Thrones/Song of Ice and Fire series. Sure, there are some people who are downright evil, but most of the people you originally hated you at some point begin cheering on.

And Anti-Heros as main characters are just even more entertaining. Hannibal Lector from Thomas Harris's book series made famous with Silence of the Lambs. You have a serial killer as the main character. An apparently insane serial killer, but you'll be damn if you don't absolutely love every scene with that serial killer, cause at some point he starts making horrible sense to you, and he's essentially doing some good. You can relate to the monster, and find the more you learn about him, the more you can either sympathize for him or respect him. You cheer on his escape. Dexter (now a tv show) is another similar serial killer anti-hero made popular, and in a way I think Manji shares a lot with them. They don't follow society's laws, but really they're taking out the trash of society in their own ways.
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SereneChaos



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PostPosted: Sun Aug 26, 2012 8:51 pm Reply with quote
The first manga that popped into my head is Black Butler. It's mainly evil verse worse evil, but the ending won't be. The two protagonists will be pitted against each other and there won't be a good guy or bad guy. Will Sebastian kill and eat Ciel's soul, or will Ciel escape the contract somehow and leave Sebastian unrewarded for all of his work? Either way, a protagonist loses.

The other one I thought of was Death Note. While it doesn't really blend the line between good and evil, but it sure makes it easy to root for a mass murderer.

In a way Bakuman kind fits as well because for the main character to succeed, other characters have to fail. Side characters who are likable and portrayed positively have to fail and not achieve their goals for the main characters to achieve theirs. It makes me guilty rooting for any of them, including the MCs.
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Princess_Irene
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PostPosted: Mon Aug 27, 2012 6:18 am Reply with quote
Oh, I love that it's possible to have an intelligent discussion here!

littlegreenwolf wrote:

But this isn't just something that I find unique to manga, or even standout with the medium. It's a story device that in my opinion is pretty much essential for me to really like enjoy a story. If you don't have a bad guy who has some depth to them have depth to them, it usually bored me. If you can make me cheer for them at some point, you're brilliant.


True, true. I find it more common in fantasy literature than some other genres (and you listed mostly fantasy titles, which is interesting), although Mariah Stewart, a romance-turned-mystery author, stands out to me as the one who did it best in the middle book of her "Mercy Street" series - she made me feel sympathy for a child molester/murderer by giving him a credible background. But a lot of what we consider classic literature relies on the black vs white point of view. Off the top of my head, the best example of a classic that doesn't do that is John Steinbeck's The Moon is Down, which was not thought of as a potential classic in its day for showing the bad guys (German soldiers) as too human. If it wasn't six in the morning, I'm sure I could come up with some other examples... Laughing

SereneChaos wrote:
In a way Bakuman kind fits as well because for the main character to succeed, other characters have to fail. Side characters who are likable and portrayed positively have to fail and not achieve their goals for the main characters to achieve theirs. It makes me guilty rooting for any of them, including the MCs.


That's an interesting point about Bakuman - I hadn't thought of it in that way. That same could probably be said of most sports stories where the rivals become friends. It's starting to surface in Hikari no Densetsu's third (bunko) volume and I remember it in the Princess 9 anime.

Alan45 wrote:
As far as romance is concerned, while I like the genre, I simply refuse to read anything that confuses sex and violence.


And it's disturbing how often that happens - and in my reading at least, more in shoujo than josei. Doreen Owens Malek, a romance novelist, wrote an essay for the book Dangerous Men, Adventurous Women called "Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know" about how the hero of romance is often the villain - she traces it back to the myth of Eros and Psyche and Beauty and the Beast. While those stories aren't likely to form the base of Japanese romance literature, it's interesting (from an academic standpoint, at least) this is a feature of both eastern and western romances with a female target audience. (Not to mention disturbing as all get out.)
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EireformContinent



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PostPosted: Mon Aug 27, 2012 9:21 am Reply with quote
As it was already mentioned "villainous protagonists" aren't unique to the manga. I'd say that trope is as old as the fiction itself and it mainly affects not fantasy, but historical fiction. While in fantasy skilled author can create protagonist with moral code similar to potential readers' one, creation in historical fiction is limited by morals of the time and society that author wants to portrait. What to do to make readers rooting for people with completely different moral code?

Sometimes he can get away with minor changes by making them revolutionaries- that worked in Van Gulik's Judge Dee series, where hero is probably the only character who doesn't blame victims of the rape, but otherwise, he is plausible worshipper of Confucianism with all traits of his time. Manga example would be Lady Oscar who has some revolutionary opinions, but otherwise is a prefect royalist. On the other hand it's easy to make characters too modern in comparison or completely out of place.

Some authors avoid this issue (especially when it comes to lovemaking- people will forgive lots of dead bodies, but it would require St. Paul's skills to make them root for rapist) like in Red River or Saiunkoku Monogatari where male protagonist doesn't "use" the heroine because he feels it's a trap/play dumb. That works for a short way

The best way for convincing us that the protagonist isn't that bad is making everyone else even worse.
Let's take Vinland Saga or Souten Kouro- Thorofinn and Cao Cao are awful jerks, murders and bloodthirsty monsters, but their behaviour pale in comparison to those they fight and make them seem reasonable. That manoeuvre was also used in Dragon Ball where lots of readers pity bloodthirsty Sayians just because they were wiped out by psychopathic maniac.
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Aylinn



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PostPosted: Mon Aug 27, 2012 12:17 pm Reply with quote
Quote:
So my question is this - what series blur the line between hero and villain? How is manga in a position to make us question those distinctions, and are there any authors who do it especially well? We've previously discussed rape vs romance in this forum - where else do authors ask us to change around our points of view, either in a positive or negative way?

I can think of Cesare by Fuyumi Souryou. The main protagonist, Michael Angelo, is a naive and good-hearted boy who studies and befriends Ceaser Borgia and sees him as a hero, a saviour of humanity, etc. Laughing It is the first time I have read a story that doesn't show this infamous Machiavellian prince as one of the greatest scoundrels on earth. Admittedly, it is interesting how the author shows an awful person from the point of view of a naive person, especially since she seems to be acquainted with his spectacularly bad reputation.

There is also something like that in Pandora Hearts. Actually, I would like to ask you Princess_Irene if you are not interested in reviewing Pandora Hearts? It seems to me that you may like it, since you like mysteries. (At least, I came to this conclusion by reading your reviews of Higurashi.)
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Princess_Irene
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PostPosted: Mon Aug 27, 2012 3:53 pm Reply with quote
EireformContinent wrote:
I'd say that trope is as old as the fiction itself and it mainly affects not fantasy, but historical fiction. While in fantasy skilled author can create protagonist with moral code similar to potential readers' one, creation in historical fiction is limited by morals of the time and society that author wants to portrait. What to do to make readers rooting for people with completely different moral code?


Well, but that's assuming that the author is being faithful to the moral code of the time period rather than trying to appeal to a wider, contemporary audience by subtly adapting the characters' views to fit better with the readers'. Case in point is Anhita's Woven Riddle, a novel about late 19th century Iran where the characters, while not seeming out of place in the novel, have some very modern views that were almost certainly not safe to voice in the time or place where the book is set. Not that this is the norm rather than just a few authors hoping to sell better, but it does merit keeping in mind.

There's also an interesting religious aspect to a lot of historical fiction - littlegreenwolf mentioned Kaori Yuki's Angel Sanctuary where we root for hell over heaven and are surprised because that's not the way most of us were taught to think. (Even though it isn't historical fiction.) The novel I mentioned above tries to play with our understanding of Islam and James Michener's The Source plays quite a few religion cards as the land he describes passes through the hands of different belief systems, with each chapter asking us to reinvent our ideas of who is "good" and who is "bad."

@Aylinn
You know, I've been meaning to get back into Pandora Hearts - I got behind when Yen Plus went digital and I dropped it and now I'm frankly not sure where I am in the series. But thank you for reminding me that I should figure that out!Smile You are correct - I love mysteries. The first chapter book my mother gave me was The Strange Disappearance of Arthur Cluck and I was raised on a steady diet of "Murder, She Wrote."
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Thatguy3331



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PostPosted: Fri Sep 21, 2012 11:42 pm Reply with quote
I remember when I first read One Piece and saw how they presented the Pirates and thought to myself "how will I like the main characters?" but then Luffy showed up and I've been rooting for him, his crew and some other pirates while getting annoyed at how much shit these guys recive while realizing in the end, its how the world works.

but then as years passed and I learned I realized ALOT of series do this, hell at this point I think its safe to say theres no such thing as a true hero, and with recently getting into Ratman there is no better time for me to talk about this myslef.

I think one of my favorite takes on it was in Yu Yu Hakusho where Yuske is supposed to be a spirit detective (which I very easily waved off as a mere title because theres barely any detective work involved) protecting the human world from demons and othe supernatural threats, however yuske really dosn't give a rats ass about that and is primarily focused on keeping himself and his loved ones alive. Then chapter black comes along which not only completely blurs the line of morality and what a spirit detective truly does but also spoiler[ makes Yuuske seen as a monsterous threat by spirit world and completely ignores his previous deeds] If it weren't for Yuuske's jerkass outlook on everything and one track mindset he would have been a mental wreck. In the end I think it all really matters on what the individual mindset is which I've decided to become a theme in works I'm planning on myself, and how well you incorperate that into your surroundings be it for better or for worse.
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ridiculus



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PostPosted: Tue Sep 25, 2012 5:28 pm Reply with quote
Most heroes in many works of fiction have some sort of doubt or go through inner struggle in a certain moment in the story. It is a standard dramatic device because it is 'ah-so-human', and from Achilles to Superman it's all the same, and the manga heroes are no exception. But there are too many different genres of manga, and too many different stories and concepts so it can't be generalized; some main characters are demons, as in Hellsing or Majin tantei Nougami Neuro, and others, although human, are cruel and cunning beyond belief, as is the case with Wolfsmund.

For me, the main proponent of the abovementioned moral ambiguity of characters in the shonen comics is Kazuhiro Fujita, a mangaka never officially translated into English, which is not only a shame, but also a cultural handicap. Anyway, I think that some of his ideas and views are the mainstay of the modern mainstream shonen manga, and, what's more impressive, his two main works, Ushio and Tora and Karakuri Circus are very different in the sense how they treat "good" and "evil" characters. In the first series, there is a force that represent the Enemy, the Ultimate Evil, and in the second series, after some time we do not know anymore who is on whose side.

If we go back in time, we''ll find that Devilman was very influential in this matter.

On the side note, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure has some of the most impressive antagonists in the history of (shonen) manga.
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