A Response to HazeyHooves, and a Defense of Inconsistency · 5:13am Mar 8th, 2017
EDIT: With apologies to Bad Horse, after misunderstanding the context of a quote Hazeyhooves used.
First things first - I'm apparently judging a contest soon! I have arrived. Well, really,FanofMostEverything has arrived. I'm just jumping on his train. We've got Mr. Numbers, Cynewulf, Aragon, and Jesus-how-many-other-talented-people already writing, so at bare minimum you should keep your eye out for the stories born from this contest.
Second things second. Hazeyhooves is both very right and also simultaneously weirdly wrong.
And no, I don't just mean using a Bad Horse quote that attributes "heroes without limits" vs. "heroes with limits" to an east/west storytelling dynamic split, which is like its own mini-discussion in and of itself. I will get to that at some point but tl;dr, that's the kind of thing I expect from someone who thinks of anime like a genre - not the silliest mistake in the world, but a mistake nevertheless. The quote isn't even entirely off topic from Hazey's general paean to HunterxHunter, a work I absolutely have no strong feelings about whatsoever which is why I didn't write a whole blog already about why I love one particular aspect of the character development in it. Except I did. Over here.
I think my issue is that Hazey sort of talks about HunterxHunter's de facto magical superpower system with a lack of context. The subject of their blog is just how cool it is that Togashi made such a tight and interesting system in a kid's comic book, and that's sort of... well, lacking, is the best way I can describe it. I have watched a metric fuckton of anime over my twenty-six-ish years, and most of it has been the sort that involves - to quote a youtuber I've grown fond of - the kind of show that involves "someone getting punched very hard, very slowly." Nen is super cool and exciting and all, and I love the shit out of HunterxHunter, but as someone who spends a lot of her time writing about shit other people wrote, I've learned I'm not all that fond of just saying something is cool unless I mean to use it to illustrate a point. So today's point is this:
1) Explaining why Nen and similar structured storytelling rulesets for magical powers work really well for certain stories, and
2) Why MLP, the series, probably should not go there. And in fact, why I'm pretty sure that I don't want it to.
Hazey's blog on Nen jumps back and forth a bit, but does touch on the most interesting aspect of Togashi's strange superpower set.
The rules don't matter. Togashi wrote himself a system where he's allowed to invent any crazy special ability for a character he wants. As long as he balances them by the rules of Nen, he doesn't have to follow any rules at all. It's about creativity and expression, after all. Anything goes, do whatever you want, there are no limits.
This is sort of incorrect - Nen does have some very specific rules (the big one being Contract and Condition, which I'll get to in a bit) - but it sets up the appeal for why Nen is so fun to read about up in a very pleasing way. In the world of HunterxHunter, characters can have wildly asymmetric magical superpowers that interact in strange and exciting ways. This is a great thing to have around in your story that's focused on characters having magical fights with other characters, since it means each new confrontation has an added element of tension and intrigue. It's less about simply asking "which of these two guys punches harder", and more about asking which character can more intelligently apply the abilities they've learned.
There's just one minor thing I feel like pointing out though.
Hunter X Hunter breaks all those rules. It doesn't fit in either category, because it's partially both, yet neither. Nen is about creating your own unique powers. It took me a long time to notice how odd that nobody else ever did this (Full Metal Alchemist comes close though). How did Togashi do this?
Here's the first place where Hazey and I break company, because actually, a lot of people have done this. And are doing this. And will continue to do this.
Battle manga have been popular for years now, to the point where I'm pretty sure if I ask most people (who don't read very much) to describe "manga", the kind of stories I'll get back in response will be either direct descendants or second cousins to Dragon Ball Z (unless they're direct descendants to or cousins of Sailor Moon, that is). And while the general perception of them holds that they're about Numerical Power Levels and Transformations and What Does The Scouter Say, Vegeta, that's actually not the truth. The so-called "Big Three" of Weekly Shounen Jump - Naruto, One Piece, and Bleach - all have variations on asymmetric superpower systems. While every character learns their magical powers from more or less the same source in Bleach and Naruto, most characters also have some ability unique to them that they rely on in combat, and those abilities are largely limited only by the imagination of the creator. One Piece goes even further by not really having anything resembling an established "magic power system" for most of its run time, beyond the premise of "if you eat magic fruit you'll get superpowers but the ocean will hate you the way kryptonite hates Superman." If Nen were impressive just because you could do anything with it, it would be Just Another Justification For Magic Superpowers.
In fact, to be perfectly honest, you can't really discuss Nen without discussing the fact that most of its success comes from the fact that Togashi writes Nen battles in much the same way that Hirohiko Araki writes Stand battles. The interesting thing about two characters fighting with Nen isn't who punches who harder, it's who is more clever at using their weirdly limited and specific abilities. This is where the "Contract and Condition" bit comes in. Nen abilities actually grow stronger the more conditions that are placed on when and how they can be used - paradoxically, the less you can do with your Aura, the more you can do with it. It's why, for instance, arguably the strongest character in the series has to force people to monologue to him about their superpowers while touching a book he carries around to make his ability work- and also why a lot of the most successful fighters in the series are people who have an absurdly simple ability that they've learned to use flexibly to make up for its apparent weakness. The fact that there are no limits on what you can conceptually have as a Nen user is exciting if you want to write new characters, sure, but in terms of actually reading the story, the excitement is generated by the fact that it's a relatively limiting system.
And limits are very important to battle manga style stories. Limits are there to show you what problems your characters are overcoming, so that once they overcome them the reader is suitably impressed. Stories like HunterxHunter are basically as much a mental drama as they are a physical one in some ways. The tension isn't "will the heroes prevail" - often times you know, by sheer storytelling logic, that they will. The tension is from how. It's not unlike how mystery novels build tension. We take it for granted when we open a story by Ellery Queen that the mystery will, in fact, be solved- and solved "fairly", for that matter. What we're thumbing to the end to find out is how. How can the great detective possibly make sense of all this weird nonsense? How does he discover the real culprit? What line of reasoning are they using? Battle manga simply take this tension and impose it onto a fight. How will our hero use his limited set of super-abilities to effectively counter another set of super-abilities that seems to place him at a disadvantage?
This is, I believe, the reason HunterxHunter's writing makes Nen seem so much deeper as a system than the whole magic sword thing from Bleach or the ninja bloodlines from Naruto. While both of those series had their moments - particularly early into their runs before their respective artists flamed out creatively - HunterxHunter has always been remarkably good at framing the tension in a fight not just as "the heroes getting stronger and overcoming obstacles" but "the heroes being clever and overcoming obstacles". If you want a good example of this, Uvogin vs. The Shadow Beasts sums it up nicely. It's a squash fight between a character whose only power is super strength and a bunch of guys with weird animal-themed abilities. The thing that makes the fight interesting is in exactly how Uvogin uses his bog-standard superpower. Once he ends up paralyzed from the neck down he resorts to simply beating the rest of his opponents by biting one guy, spitting his bones out to use as a bullet, and yelling so hard in the third guy's face that it wipes him out. It's the surprising application of the power that's interesting, not the power itself.
Now I've talked a lot here about battle manga and that's because I want to stress that part of the reason Togashi's brilliant is that he's really good at telling this particular kind of story, and Nen was sort of uniquely suited to his needs. The twist here is that I want to make a point of tracking back.
HazeyHooves's blog isn't just about HunterxHunter. It's about My Little Pony. Specifically about how unicorn magic works, and how it seems to be on some level inconsistent (without a degree of headcanoning). The post - whether intentionally or not - seems to sort of argue that this is a bug in the system.
And it's not.
Here's the thing about consistent magic systems: they work really well for certain kinds of storytelling. For others, they're unnecessary and potentially detrimental. The Lord of the Rings doesn't really improve in quality when you explain the details of what Gandalf can and cannot do with his robe and wizard hat. And for a sitcom-meets-morality-play weekly television series like MLP, which jumps between minor adventures and magical slice-of-life, over-defining how magic works would likely be a really bad idea. The tension in a battle manga comes from seeing a character with a limited set of abilities overcoming a challenge (or evolving beyond it). The tension in MLP is rarely, if ever, on overcoming physical obstacles. It's generally focused on overcoming social obstacles.
This is not an insignificant difference.
See, the reason Bad Horse (somewhat incorrectly) made a quote about "eastern stories" about "characters who don't have flaws" isn't that battle manga protagonists don't have flaws. They have plenty of flaws. Goku is brash and naive and often does stupidly crazy things because he really wants to fight some person. Naruto is an idiot who deliberately misbehaves for the sake of attracting attention, and often puts himself into harm's way to show off. Ichigo... okay, Ichigo legitimately has no flaws beyond "being a really boring main character", but even lowly Gon Freecs has had character flaws that were super significant to his development later into HunterxHunter's run. But the stories largely aren't about their flaws. They come up, sure, but it's often in relation to the characters having to deal with some kind of external obstacle and being held back by their own limitations, which they then overcome. In a battle manga, the moment to moment struggle is generally physical, with the internal drama being developed over the course of the story.
In MLP, on the other hand, most episodes that aren't straight up comedy or deliberate genre homages -and okay, even most of those - are focused on interpersonalconflicts. Rainbow Dash meets a guy at a con and they argue about their favorite books, stuff happens, that gets resolved. Twilight Sparkle needs to learn there's a difference between showing off and being confident in her abilities. Fluttershy and Rarity have a miscommunication that leads to both of them being uncomfortable with the position they're placed in. Applejack refuses to accept basic mathematics. Going to a ball ends up sucking more than everyone involved imagined it would. The Lord of Chaos has awoken and it's our job to make sure he learns to Not Be As Awful.
None of these are conflicts where the tension comes from watching characters cleverly solve some physical problem. They're stories where the core of the conflict is finding a way to deal with a social situation and moving forward. Rainbow Dash learns to live and let live and appreciate someone else's views on her favorite books. Twilight Sparkle uses her magic to help people. Fluttershy and Rarity have an honest conversation even though they're afraid of accidentally hurting each other's feelings. Applejack learns that One Pony plus Hundreds of Apple Trees does, in fact, equal "this ends badly". Everyone learns a valuable lesson about expectations, and also about the magic of your local doughnut joint. The Lord of Chaos realizes that damaging an emotional connection with someone you care about kind of sucks.
So, pop quiz: aside from friendship literally being magic, what, in any of this, is improved by a specific knowledge of how each and every one of Twilight's spells work, and how unicorn spellcasting is even accomplished?
If you said "none of it because this was never the core of the conflict or the meat of how it was resolved", congratulations! Bookish Delight beat us all there by like, months. Because Bookish Delight is a goddamn genius. (CALL ME)
This is kind of why I don't want MLP to ever really go into detail as to how all of magic works, or what the "rules" are beyond whatever is needed to establish the day's McGuffin. First, I don't think MLP itself benefits much from the creation of strict limitations on how magic works. The magic of MLP is window dressing for the character interaction of MLP, and far from being poorer for that, it's actually much richer. If this were a series about unicorns fighting each other, sure, tell me all the rules so I can follow the play-by-play. But this is a show about making friends. And not even in a making-friends-through-competition sports-and-games centric story, a story about the act of having and maintaining personal relationships as well as learning how to interface with a larger community.
Second, the less the show defines, the more fans do. If I want to write a story about unicorns fighting stuff, I'd much rather be the one who gets to set all the rules and quirks of unicorn magic than borrow them all from a show that isn't really concerned with unicorns fighting stuff. i'd rather have the freedom to create those rules myself than be handed them by the show. Because ultimately - and I say this with all due respect- I'd be better at it than the show's staff. Not because they're not good at it, but because the world they're creating - insofar as it's a creative, unified world - is built around telling very different stories than the one I'd be interested in portraying. We may be using the same basic character slates, but our goals are so wildly different that what works for them probably won't work for me.
On that note, HazeyHooves, if you're reading this, I'm really sorry I ranted to death, your blog was fun to read, I just.
Nitpick.
ARGH!
MLP gets so much more fun when you look at it as social/emotional conflicts backdropped by magic (or in EQG's case, magic+tech) rather than the other way around. Doubly more fun when you try to not make the series' mechanics or even characters' track records line up numerically. Life is imprecise and erratic, as are matters of the heart.
Questing for "consistency" (in the traditional way fans/nerds enjoy the term in action) in MLP is a recipe for personal torture. Because MLP is able to perfectly encapsulate the bullshit that is life, force us to take a long hard look at it, and then either laugh at it or go cry in a corner. :D
(Which is why, honestly, that whole first section of the blog you linked just had me utterly bewildered at how off the mark it was. Not even completely wrong, just, as you say,... so intensely off.
You have once again hit the nail very squarely upon the head.
I think the only problem with your MLP thesis is that while the vast majority of the show is just as you say it is, we nevertheless get episodes bookending each season that toss that premise out the window and replace it with "throw magic at this problem until it keels over!" The Plot™. I love the premiere and finale episodes, but they dilute what's essential about MLP--what protects it from needing to care about laying down the Rules--enough that we all start feeling the need to pick at the scab.
This line of thinking also sort of makes me start to consider that the Elements of Harmony are fundamentally a really boring plot device? Like, they're dorky and I love them forever, but they get rid of the necessity of actually solving problems in a constructive real-world way and replace it with "we're just friends so much you DIED, villain!" That's not really the same as the thing you talked about in this blog, it's just painted to look the same. This might be the fundamental problem that afflicts the premiere/finale episodes.
On a separate note, I was considering your comparison of mystery fiction and battle manga, and I came to wonder if there isn't also a parallel sort of force that works in pieces of media (I'm gonna talk about anime, because that's what I'm familiar with) that are less focused on the head game. Specifically thinking about Kill la Kill and Gurren Lagann here, I feel like you don't watch those shows to see what tricks the characters will pull out of their hats, but rather how far the creators are willing to take a very simple premise. Like, Kill la Kill fights have very few rules, all play out in relatively similar ways, and are all linked by how completely ridiculous and over the top they are. You don't watch Kill la Kill because you think Ryuko is going to use her abilities super cleverly (though that does come up at times, like the first fight against Inumuta or the final battle against Ragyo), you watch Kill la Kill because you want to see just how far Trigger is willing to push the ridiculous bullshit.
It's sort of a meta thing, and TTGL possibly exhibits this property better. Just how loud will Simon have to yell to win this week's fight? Just how many layers of Gunmen will we reach before your eyes and ears become physically incapable of perceiving the wonderful inanity of the plot? You might be able to couch this theory in the terms of what you've already said about battle manga, etc., but I think the metafictional aspects are also interesting to consider.
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This is part of why most of the bookends - aside from "Magical Mystery Cure" (good episode but a bit rushed in its pacing), and the Discord two-parter, and "Our Town" - I have very mixed feelings about, ranging from "eh" to "nah". The show's not really capable of switching gears as effectively as it might be. That said, I'd rather it be very good at the thing it is most of the time than at the thing it is twice a season for fun.
Note that all of the times the Elements have been used, though, the driving force was Twilight having to develop her relationship with her friends further. So in that regard, they were pretty successful. I'd argue the few times they haven't worked as well were the original Equestria Girls movie (how can Sunset Shimmer use the Element of Magic this way?) as well as the sudden addition of the Tree of Harmony to the mythos. Also the minor retcon - note that despite the sparkly magic necklaces, Twilight never states that her friends are the bearers of the Elements of Harmony in the pilot. She says they are the elements. That they, in some way, embody the six traits of harmony. Linking the power of the elements to the physical doodads was not, I suspect, always the intent.
Kill LaKill/TTGL are both based largely on Japanese superhero shows and mecha series, which is a weird but subtle distinction from straight up battle manga. Battle manga based on the Dragonball Z mold are often part martial arts story, part sports/training story, and part supernatural mystery story. Japanese superhero shows tend to take more inspiration from Kamen Rider and Japan's long history of people who transform into heroes, or classic giant robot shows. The tension there isn't so much about clever use of abilities, but about physical catharsis. Will our hero overcome the problems this week's monster/opponent presents? Basically, the formula of these shows is to set up the bad guy as being really bad/a problem, and then give the viewer a sense of emotional catharsis when the hero overcomes a problem. TTGL is particularly good at that, because most of the early problems in the series are dealt with by Simon overcoming his own personal weakness, followed by an arc of SImon getting his shit emotionally wrecked, followed by Simon getting shit back together and becoming the hero the world needs. Repeat after timeskip, but instead of Simon getting emotionally wrecked we have the Simon-in-prison arc.
Yeah, the show itself has little to gain and much to lose from concretizing the rules of magic too much (though I would like something about earth pony magic beyond "they use their strength to tend the land," but that's just me.) Fan fiction where physical challenges crop up more often than an episode of Double Dare needs those rules, but as you noted, that's not what the show's about.
Well said all around.
ETA: Oh, and thanks for the plug. Glad to have you with me.
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I thought the same, but that logic could easily be taken too far - even action movies involve some degree of social work for the hero to win. MLP definitely emphasises that aspect more, but ultimately the two-part episodes do differ in having a physical problem (though solved socially) rather than a social one.
I think it's worth noting that really only once has magical force, not just power, been necessary in resolving a conflict, and at that point, the power levels were enumerated: four princesses versus literally every other pony and magical being in the land. And it was a draw.
Dammit, you're inspiring me to write fic again. D:
memecrunch.com/meme/1T224/you-insulted-my-wrx/image.jpg
Pro tip: Don't use quotation marks when you are not quoting someone but putting your own words in their mouth.
I wasn't talking about manga or anime, but the entire Eastern storytelling tradition, going back at least to the first millenium A.D. in China, versus the entire Western storytelling tradition back not all the way to Homer, but to Plato.
Every writer in the West has heard the advice to make flawed characters. I saw that advice just today, in the description of a talk I'm attending this weekend. This is because Western literary theory originates with Plato, and has been dominated all through the ages by Platonic and Christian thought, which conceptualizes of every natural category as having a perfect, ideal Form. When we say a human has "flaws", it implies there are a finite number of finite differences distinguishing that person from the perfect Platonic Form of a person. It also implies that, once those flaws are fixed, that person is perfect and can no longer improve.
I (hope I) didn't say that Eastern characters don't have flaws, but that they are not always originally conceived of as a set of flaws which are to be fixed over the course of the story. (Sometimes they are.) The Eastern traditions do not (AFAIK) have this Platonic ontology in which individuals humans are most concisely described by how they fall short of perfection. They have a notion of enlightenment, but it isn't generally regarded as a normal part of human nature, does not close off the possibility of further development, and is a mystical notion of sudden, holistic, quantum transcendence rather than the more mechanical Western notion of fixing the things that are wrong one-by-one. (If you want to view enlightenment as perfection, it is perfection of a soul rather than of a human; it's sometimes presented in Buddhist thought as the end stage of a soul's journey through the bodies of many species.) Their supporting cast can often be viewed simply as flawed characters, but their heroes are likely to accumulate powers and abilities, or to further develop powers that they already have. Their ancient stories and their modern videogames view character development as an endless process of "levelling up", or of discovering or controlling unsuspected abilities within themselves, rather than of fixing a small number of flaws. I'm not aware of these concepts existing in Western stories before Star Wars and Dungeons & Dragons. Even the trope of gradually discovering and learning to control superpowers, eg Steven Universe--I can't think of any examples before Star Wars.
4448235 For context, here's the actual quote Hazeyhooves used I was responding to, which admittedly I should have asked for context on before responding - it's a thing I've heard from others before, so I'm sorry I misunderstood.
Your more complete explanation is definitely easier for me to agree with, but I found myself suspicious of classing that as an east/west vibe when talking about modern storytelling, which I originally assumed the quote was referring to. Cultural exchange has done a number on that.
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I wasn't trying to argue that it should be changed. In my blogs and reviews I examined the show's canon by saying here's how different episode writers can handle the same thing, and here's some ways fans interpret it... just to show that it doesn't matter too much because it'll always be subjective. so the core theme of friendship is the important standard.
it seems like everyone's reading that one section without that context, and thinking i'm some pedantic nerd who completely missed the point of the show
the magic really doesn't bother me, I just used it as a starting point to show that episode writers slide into some familiar patterns.
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Bear in mind, I kind of found you at all through that post. What additional context was I supposed to have, a knowledge of someone I'd never encountered before I encountered them? ^^
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I know it's my fault, since I write for a very small number of readers, and (for some reason) don't expect others to even find me. so I can see how many lines I wrote aren't very clear when they're being sincere or sarcastic. or the weird scattered logic I use to bring up unrelated topics, like the Twilight Sparkle thing. I just wanted to clear up my intention, because I was approaching MLP from a similar perspective as you were (at least I believe so)
I wasn't saying that they're all DBZ and not asymmetrical. I mean, almost all western superheroes are written like that too. Luffy's power is similar to how the Avengers or X-Men are handled: he got a unique power, it doesn't need to be scientifically explained.... it just works, and readers know he's not going to suddenly grow new powers out of nowhere. Naruto was always baffling to me because it establishes early that abilities can be learned from scrolls and schools, but there's all these special features at birth like the magical beasts, and eyeballs that can copy abilities. I could almost wave those off and say the main focus is on learning abilities, except the main 3 characters were plain vanilla for many story arcs, while all these new characters were appearing with unique powers. I guess those techniques were never copied because of family secrecy, but the story seemed to forget about the "learning" part of going to ninja school. and I still have no clue what Bleach was trying to do
I pointed out FMA as an exception because I was mainly focused on settings where characters themselves choose what they can do. Admittedly I haven't read all of FMA, but from how friends explained it to me, it shares something with HXH that the other battle mangas don't. Alchemy can do anything, but at a cost, and it's up to the characters themselves to use that creatively without destroying themselves. Much like in HXH, it's not the creator deciding on a cool power and saying "here, you get this power because it coincidentally fits your personality," but presented as the characters choosing a power because that's what they wanted.
I did enjoy a lot of your analysis on HXH, especially the perspective on how it works for a reader (I think I was looking at it more from Togashi's view). It's limited scope really does work wonderfully for tension, and characters are rewarded for tactical creativity. Gon and Genthru create abilities with obvious flaws, but the way they apply them ironically turns those weaknesses into strengths. Meanhhile, other characters like Kastro and Cheetu are punished for being unimaginative, regardless of their strengths. it's not the only story to be about cleverness, but to me it works on multiple levels by also making creativity the theme of Nen.
that's why I admire it from a creator standpoint. it's really tough to balance limitations with creative freedom. in any other story, a character like Meruem or Alluka would seem like an overpowered cop-out, but he makes them work.
I'm not so sure on this with Togashi
some of his story arcs feel like pyrrhic victories, though still salvagable. I personally thought Gon's character arc was meant as a tragedy. it's hard to predict.