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JoinedDec 27, 2019

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Dec 27, 2019

Les Misérables (Manga) add

Recommended

Preliminary (8/33 chp)

This is probably the best adaptation of Les Miserables out there. It unfortunately doesn't have an English translation as of me writing this, but for those of you who speak enough French to understand most stuff with a little help from google translate once in a while, the French translation of this manga is great.

Most people are at least passingly familiar with the plot of Les Mis. It is one of the most adapted works of all time, and one of those adaptations is one of the most successful Broadway musicals of all time. Unfortunately, the very nature of adaptation means that a lot of ... stuff gets left out. This is especially unfortunate in the case of Les Mis because the original is somewhat hard to read for a lot of people due to Victor Hugo's tendency to ramble about tangentially related topics. This adaptation is a great solution for those who are for whatever reason unable to read the book but at the same time wish to experience the story in as close to its original form as possible.

This adaptation is incredibly accurate. Some things are told in a different order than they were in the book, but the events as they happened are largely unchanged both in content and tone/theme. The first two chapters are dedicated to Jean Valjean's backstory, and the third is about Bishop Myriel. This is the opposite order of how things are introduced in the book, but the chapters are still incredibly accurate. So much stuff that's left out of most adaptations is shown here, like the bishop's sister and maid, Valjean covering for his nieces and nephews when they steal food, and Valjean being attacked by dogs when he tries to take refuge in a doghouse. It's clear that the author of this manga had a great level of respect and love for the work he was adapting.

In addition to being incredibly accurate while cutting out a lot of rambling, the art and symbolism in this manga is also incredible. There are a lot of things I could point to as an example of this, but my personal favourite is two pages that happen after Valjean is forgiven by the bishop. He is shown roaring in pain, a lion biting his neck and chains around him breaking. Then as the panels progress he begins to grow younger, turning to a young man, a child, a toddler, and finally a baby. As he grown younger his expression changes, and his scream of rage and pain turns into the crying of an infant. When he's a metaphor baby, the bishop comforts him by holding his hand. As this is happening, Jean Valjean is wondering who his is, and the bishop's voice says "Your name is Jean Valjean." I'm probably not describing this very well but it really needs to be witnessed firsthand. This sequence of Valjean being symbolically reborn is so good and such a great representation of Victor Hugo's intentions and work.

If you have any interest in the story of Les Mis, whether you're a long time fan of the book or you've seen the musical's movie adaptation once at the insistence of a friend, then you should definitely read this manga. The style differs from that of the book, but the substance remains largely unchanged.

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Dec 27, 2019

Tokyo Ghoul:re (Manga) add

Not Recommended

Preliminary (102/181 chp)

Spoiler

A warning that this review contains spoilers, as it's kind of impossible to talk about what I hated about this manga without talking about the specific plot points that ruined it for me.

I wanted to love Tokyo Ghoul. For a while I did, I loved the first series and the first season of the anime. Unfortunately this manga is just kind of bad. The best part of it is the various side characters, my personal favorites being Saiko, Juuzo, and Karren. Unfortunately the main character, despite starting out interesting, eventually transforms into a boring hypercompetent badass who impregnates a girl that completely forgot about her ... dreams of studying biology in order to wait around for a man she doesn't even know that well and who is, to the best of her knowledge, dead.

The worldbuilding also goes off the rails. Instead of having the long hard process of ghouls fighting for equality and finding a way to sate their hunger without killing people the author takes the easy way out. They introduce a common enemy for human and ghouls to fight that, conveniently enough, don't have any sort of sentience or pathos the way ghouls do. They also introduce an artificial food that ghouls can feed on so say goodbye to any moral questions about needing to kill to survive. There were plenty of ways that humans and ghouls could have made peace without this. Human die all the time, and they can lose a lot of blood without dying. Inventing artificial food feels like a cheap cop-out.

The worst part of the worldbuilding in my opinion is that instead of exploring the relationship between humans and ghouls more in depth, the author instead decides to just give people more powers like their kagune breathing fire and other bullshit like that. There is some interesting stuff about RC cells becoming cancerous and Eto's revelation leading to the formation of human ghoul's rights groups, but for the most part they just have dumb conspiracy stuff. There's also almost zero exploration of the state of ghoulkind outside Tokyo. We get some German characters and a guy who lived in the countryside but there's nothing about the ghoul-hunting organizations outside of Tokyo.

The final and worst part of this series that I'm going to talk about is the fact that the author clearly hates LGBT people. There's Nico, the okama caricature who shows attraction to a fourteen year old boy. There's Big Madam, the trans woman who sexually abused a child. There's Matsuri, who is portrayed as a creepy comedic relief pervert. Finally and worst of all there's Mutsuki, who is revealed to be afab through having his shirt forcibly torn open by a rapist, and who clearly experiences incredibly intense social dysphoria when he's forced to dress like a girl, and who continues living as a man after the series ends, and who is revealed to only be "pretending" to be a man because he was abused as a child and doesn't like feeling sexualized by men staring at him. He also mutilates animals. He's basically the tragic traumatized female that every terf thinks trans men are combined with the mentally ill yandere serial killer stereotypes that more often get associated with trans women.

There's a lot of things I loved about Tokyo Ghoul. The original anime will always hold a special place in my heart. There are clearly a lot of people who enjoyed this manga and you might too, but for me it is one of the most disappointing sequels that I have ever read.

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