Derridean language games in Undead Unluck.
Plus, quick reactions to My Hero Academia, Spy x Family, and Akane-banashi.
Today’s Reaction: Undead Unluck Chapter 201
I had planned to do a livestream about this chapter this morning, but I had to cancel.
Now I really wish I had done this chapter as a live reaction.
The revelation that Lan is planning a language game would have excited me.
But then revealing it is shiritori across 7,000 languages would have left me gobsmacked.
But then Lan turns whatever word they say into the object itself, and now you’re not only doing a story that speaks to the challenges of translating across languages (as translating Undead Unluck from Japanese to other languages is a challenge) but also about translating words into images (which a comic like Undead Unluck also has to do), and–
UGH, I wish I had done a live reaction to this! It’s all about play and language, like something out of Derrida.
Pre-conceptions
But before I talk about this chapter: because I did already write a script for what would have been a live reaction, I am going to share the preamble portion to define what I was expecting for the chapter, before revealing whether the chapter paid it off.
So, below are my edited remarks for what I was going to talk about in the livestream before I had to cancel:
There are only three things I want to bring up about where this arc is before we get to the live reaction.
I Did Not Expect Language to Look Like That
First, I did not expect the embodiment of the concept of Language to look like that.
I don’t mean as a small child–I’m not entirely sure what we’re going for symbolically with that design, but as a design, it works to stand in contrast to the adults Nico and Ichico. Heck, if it turns out at the end of this arc that somehow Nico and Ichico ended up adopting Language–or, as the manga shortens it, Lan–if Nico and Ichico ended up adapting Lan, I wouldn’t be surprised.
No, the small child angle isn’t what surprised me. It’s the smile. Are we to read into that smile a connection to Apocalypse? That would make sense: Lan is all about language, Lan has her own book with her, and now she has Lan’s slasher smile. If I’m missing something obvious where this was all explained earlier in the manga, please be patient with me–but for now, that’s a mystery I can’t figure out, just how Lan is related to Apocalypse.
Losing Track of the Plot
And onto the second point, and other things I’m not getting: I am losing track of the plot.
Re-reading Chapter 199 helped for understanding the roles of Soul, Death, Change, and Luck as either tools or motivations for humanity’s continued progression. And it’s not bad to have neutral or good ideas like Soul and Luck be the antagonists or even villains of this story. Granted, I am on edge with this manga being adapted for animation by David Pro and the whole Soul Eater / Fire Force complaints that I carry into just about any anime discussion–but that’s on me, not this story, it’s just something I notice once we have the idea of the soul here as an antagonist but also Death treated as motivation for people to accomplish as much as they can.
(Sidebar: if this story somehow made Death not just a motivation for people to accomplish more but a _toxic_ motivation for people to accomplish more, the equivalent of using money to motivate people to work harder for less pleasure, that would impress me. I mean, it’s already there: what is Pluto if not the god of both death and money?)
Still, while Chapter 199 helped with figuring out some details, other ones elude me. I didn’t quite understand what Soul meant that their existence is the embodiment of how people can communicate–I guess this is more a spiritual “if you know, you know” kind of thing as opposed to Lan’s embodiment of actual signifier-based languages as through visual, written, or aural communication?
Does Nico and Ichico’s Relationship Work?
So, that takes care of two out of the three points I wanted to bring up. Let’s tackle the last point:
I don’t know whether Nico and Ichico are going to end up as a couple.
I actually appreciate that the two pretty much don’t know each other at all. I thought this would end with the two realizing they are attracted–and I’m not saying that isn’t the most likely result in this story–but right now I could be convinced that the one major change in this world ends up being that Nico and Ichico don’t get together, just to confirm that this world will never be entirely like the original. I don’t have anything to base this on, beyond how absolutely against any relationship with Nico that Ichico is–and nothing against Nico, but, yeah, Ichico gets to say she’s not interested, so I’m kind of tense at the idea of forcing this relationship if neither party is up for it. Like I said, if they don’t end up together, I think it would be a bittersweet acknowledgement that change in the world–change as literally represented now in this story as the character named Change who is a battle-hungry angry person–is inevitable but not always wanted, helpful, or good.
And Nico and Ichico not being together also would prevent Tozuka from badly handling yet another romance in this story. Like, I’m still not entirely sold on Andy and Fuuko, their first-chapter interactions being the largest deterrent. And I still despise the obnoxious way Rip handled his marriage to Latla and Leila–seriously, what dipshit doesn’t inform the people he is marrying that he wants this to be a poly relationship? That’s just rude.
At least Tozuka does well at “animating” Ichico in soul form. I laughed at her using a wisp of her soul’s “hair” to wipe her brow in relief.
(And if I may add to my previously drafted pre-conception remarks: I’m so glad how Ichico is also drawn in the spread on pages 4 and 5 of Chapter 201, where her bangs are held together like hands in prayer over her nervousness about Nico’s upcoming language duel.)
Post-conceptions
So, those were my pre-conceptions that I wrote before reading today’s chapter; let’s jump into Chapter 201 and see what happens in Nico and Lan’s language duel.
I am grateful the translator David Evelyn didn’t try to change the words and just kept words in their original language with an English translation in parentheses–it has to be hard enough to translate from Japanese to English, but to now also have to translate across other languages makes this commendable work by Evelyn.
Nico Is Imaginative–Just Dependent on Details
If there is a flaw to the story or to my inability to remember all the details from Undead Unluck, it’s how Ichico and even Nico himself refer to him as lacking imagination.
There is so much about Nico that doesn’t make me think of him as someone who lacks imagination.
The man is a scientist–that requires imagination. The man is in this world that exceeds reality–that is not the same as imagination because it is now literally in front of him, but again, as a scientist, presumably a good scientist, that should mean this is expanding what his mind can imagine.
However, the chapter thankfully does address my concerns: as Nico says, he’s a scientist, he appreciates “details,” and unless he has enough information to make the thing, he can’t imagine it well enough to make the thing. This is the same weakness Momo in My Hero Academia has, only altered: Momo has to know the chemical composition of what she creates, Nico needs enough details, whether chemical or otherwise, to make the thing. I’m going to keep circling back to the writer’s dilemma in all of this, but it’s that problem of being too smart for your own good: instead of just imagining the thing in your writing, you get too bogged down with numbers, dates, sizes, weights, and so on. That dedication to realism rather than believability has doomed enough stories.
I can appreciate Nico’s presumably limited imagination is itself a limitation to prevent him from being over-powered.
I also can appreciate that, just because someone is imaginative in one way does not mean they are a visual learner or that good at picturing what is being said to them: enough of us have challenges trying to picture something no matter how well the written or spoken description is.
All of that said, it just bothers me that, in the same chapter where Nico rushes into the game of shiritori and admits he “never was the type to read the instruction manual” that we are to believe he is not that imaginative. Isn’t his rushing into a game whose rules he doesn’t understand enough of a limitation? Why now also add that he doesn’t imagine as well?
Learning by Instruction versus Learning by Practice
But go back to what Nico said about himself: “I never was the type to read the instruction manual.”
That speaks to me.
I too tend to start playing around with an argument, computer program, video game, set of assemble-yourself-furniture first to get my hands around it before I know enough about what I’m trying to do–before I read the instruction manual.
I’d rather ask questions on a topic or piece of writing to learn about it, and sometimes that means entering into a discussion I am not prepared for because I didn’t do the reading on the theory beforehand.
I’d rather turn on a video game and start playing it than read how to jump, run, and attack.
The Writer’s Dilemma
And language doesn’t always work that way: sometimes you need the instruction manual, sometimes you need to set it aside. I got a PhD in literature; I teach writing and literature. From those experiences, you need pre-writing and just-start-writing-already as well as go-back-and-edit-it-later. Sometimes you need to put together a sentence without knowing the idea you’re trying to convey. Or you have the idea but are just dumping words on the page until you go back to the dictionary or thesaurus–the “instruction manual”–to figure out the right words you need. Or you write out what you have to say without worrying about grammar before going back to a style guide or grammar guide–the “instruction manual” again–to make sure punctuation, verb tenses, and citations are how they need to be written.
How much of all of this–writing before you know what you want to say, knowing what you want to say but lacking the words, getting it written out and then worrying later how to make it clear, comprehensible to the intended audience, grammatically correct, and cited properly–is about imagination or not, I can’t say. If you write before you know what you want to say, I can’t help but call that imaginative. If you know what you want to say but lack the words, that sounds like a failure of imagining the words you need.
In that case, Nico is the writer’s dilemma–so, again, I see how this would interest Undead Unluck creator Yoshifumi Totsuka as a writer who needs to find the right word or the right image to communicate a plot detail or a character’s feeling, and the struggle of imagination to get that idea across. In recent live reactions, I have disliked some of Totsuka’s visual choices, finding them hard to read a contrast between opponents, characters who look too similar, a failure to make a character pop up against the background, or an inability to read an action on the page. I hate reading authorial intention, but I can’t help but wonder whether Totsuka was thinking about those challenges of communicating when plotting a chapter that is all about the inability to find the right word.
Nico x Ichico: Still Not Working for Me
When I started this chapter, I still wasn’t feeling the romance between Nico and Ichico. In a chapter about finding the right words, that seems like an obvious move to get them into a relationship upgrade. It remains to be seen whether what I anticipate, that the failure of language to find the right words to communicate the feeling you have towards someone is what compels Nico and Ichico to communicate their feelings for each other another way, will play out. Heck, Nico can’t even hear Ichico’s soul right now, so that kind of fails at using language.
And it means Nico is the only one who will be heard, as Ichico in soul form can’t be heard by him–which tips the power balance to the man, and that leads to uncomfortable implications (that it is up to him to get his feelings out there, that she is silenced and can only listen to him, that he may take on physical actions such as a kiss or more likely medical treatment of Ichico to communicate his love for her) that all bother me where this then becomes a story about the man getting to tell the woman how he feels to propel this relationship as opposed to her having much of a say in the matter.
Final Thoughts
What else can I say about this chapter? I’m not a fan of Nico referring to science as something that can “negate the world’s irrationalities.” That is very much a problem of who gets to define what is and isn’t irrational. In Dr Stone the joy of science is about how to take what you didn’t know and try to learn about it–it’s not turning the irrational into rational, it’s turning what you don’t know into what you know. This reads to me more like the problems of Fire Force (back to beating that dead flaming horse): if you don’t understand something, just re-write the reality to have it make sense. This isn’t Nelson Goodman’s Ways of Worldmaking, this is Nico trying to freeze this vast world into something “rational,” and that irks me.
Otherwise, this was a really good chapter, at least for my interests in the thought process of going from an idea to a word, or the different styles of learning, by instruction or by practice. I don’t have much to say about the artwork beyond how well Ichico is drawn in soul form and managing to use her hair to communicate her thoughts. The paneling and page spreads do not distract from the action. If I had any minor criticism, the words are having to do more work than the images, even if that makes sense when this is a verbal battle. But when you have other series like Akane-banashi that can take the spoken word and turn it into a visual representation, there is something about this battle of words that could use a visual improvement. I don’t know how the anime will do so. (And I don’t know how any abridged series will do so–and given my own limited imagination, someone is going to abridge this like an Epic Rap Battle, aren’t they?)
Other Releases
So, that takes of Undead Unluck–a thrilling chapter all about words.
Before I ask questions to encourage discussion about that chapter, since I didn’t do a livestream today, I might as well use this afternoon to write some thoughts on what other chapters came out this weekend.
My Hero Academia Chapter 418
Stop bringing back All For One. Stop making him the puppeteer of everything. Stop.
I avoid talking about My Hero Academia as any dedicated episode of the livestream, notwithstanding the “Ochaco x Toga” discussion I hope to have in a future episode.
I avoid dedicating entire episodes to the series in part because Horikoshi’s glacier pace and long-term planning means that any live reaction I would have to a new chapter is going to fall apart in one of two ways: either I’m going to be overly enthused because something well done happens, only for that optimism to fall apart when the results don’t pan out, or I’m going to be overly critical rather than letting the story reach its conclusion and show that my criticism was unwarranted because the ending managed to establish why that element I disliked was there and led to a satisfying conclusion to the story.
Today is definitely a problem of the latter, because there are too many elements in this chapter–including the likelihood that All For One was the one to give Tenko the decay Quirk and hence precipitating the deaths of his family and his separation from society–for me to see how Horikoshi is going to pay this off. No amount of fan reactions about how this was obviously set up from the beginning–“It was already established that All For One had numerous candidates in mind, not just Tenko but also Touya and Number Six,” or “It was established since Izuku saw the One For All vestiges in the Sports Festival that Quirks are spiritual and live on even after the person’s death, hence why All For One’s Quirk is still in Shigaraki even after Bakugo killed All For One”–is going to hamper my disappointment.
Just because something is set up earlier doesn’t somehow make the result appealing, especially in serialized storytelling where an audience is so used to an idea that an abrupt change in what the readers believed, no matter what new evidence is presented or how long ago it was set up and barely foreshadowed, that next to nothing is going to change their expectations.
For me, the problem is not whether this was all set up: it was.
The problem is, now Shigaraki’s agency is next to nothing.
“But even if All For One gave Tenko the decay Quirk and planned to have the rest of the Shimura family killed so he could groom Tenko, that doesn’t change that society still refused to help Tenko and take him to the police or adopt him.” And now we’re establishing that, even if someone intervened to help Tenko–such as Tomo or Mikkun’s families–that All For One would somehow get them killed, too, so that he still could swoop in as Shigaraki’s new hero and mentor. The problem is not whether this is set up; the problem is how tiresome it is to have All For One just be that good at planning everything out when he had zero foresight that this would inevitably lead to this one and only result.
I have ranted enough about Bungo Stray Dogs (and will again next weekend, schedule pending) about too many god-tier genius whose genius is really just the author giving these so-called “geniuses” very flimsy evidence–that then leads these so-called “geniuses” to such leaps in logic that manage to pay off exactly as planned, not because the characters are smart but because the writing is that lazy (primarily with Dazai and Fyodor, not usually with Ranpo) or the writing is dependent on a cheat (Fukuchi’s time-travel sword). With All For One, he is the worst of both: he has the smallest bits of evidence to lead to leaps in logic, and he is so overpowered that, rather than ever being defeated, he just keeps coming back, and rather than making everyone’s sacrifices–the injuries for Jiro, Hawks, and others–seem worth it, or the victories against All For One–delaying him, killing his body–seem successful, it is again a denial of any victory: All For One just comes back, and it is so tiresome. I can appreciate this is all tense so that the final payoff of Izuku and/or Shigaraki defeating All For One is that much better–but it’s kind of hard to top All Might already defeating him two times (three times if you think Robo-Suit All Might got in enough good attacks and delay). What visual can Horikoshi add, or what strategy can Izuku use, or what power can Shigaraki unleash, that will be as impressive?
This is also a problem with staging this final fight inside the mind and memories of Shigaraki: that means you can do next-to-anything in the imagination (Undead Unluck call-back, or Journey into Imagination reference, or SpongeBob meme: take your pick). And if you can do next-to-anything, then who cares, Horikoshi will never top what you yourself imagine or hope for in your fanart and fanfics.
This story has gone on too long that I can’t see how Horikoshi can satisfy. If he got to this final battle sooner (which he already did–again, maybe three times already, with All Might already knocking off the top of All For One’s head in the flashback, All Might putting down All For One in Kamino, Robo-Suit All Might delaying All For One), then the swift impact would register. But it’s been this long–I just can’t imagine what Izuku can do that will be as incredible, or what Shigaraki will do that is as emotionally devastating as All Might giving up his intestines, One For All, and his legs to stop All For One. At best, it’s going to be as disappointing as Leonardo using the power of imagination to stop Feudal Shredder in TMNT 2003–or as awesome as Bill Cipher losing in the penultimate Season 1 episode of Gravity Falls.
Spy x Family Chapter 96.1
Onto the next chapter:
This is why I had not planned on a live reaction this weekend to the post-“Anya reveals her psychic powers to Damian” follow-up chapter of Spy x Family.
I did not expect this shorter .1 chapter in between (which means, don’t expect me to do a livestream about Spy x Family for a month, not until that Damian thing is wrapped up).
But I should have anticipated such an option as an interstitial .1 chapter.
And this interstitial frustratingly delays any payoff to whether Damian is going to think Anya is just making stuff up and hence undermining the cliffhanger’s importance, or Damian now believes Anya–and now I sit here, frustrated that, rather than more believable choices of Anya telling her parents or Anya telling Becky, she tells the boy her dad really wants her to befriend.
Speaking of her dad: this chapter again includes the parts about Twilight I dislike the most. Once again, despite supposedly being a master spy (yes, I know that was already undermined as early as him spitting out his coffee in Chapter 1–moving on), he collapses into panic at the price of Anya’s dress. Once again, despite recognizing how much pressure he is putting onto Anya, he again is putting so much pressure onto her that he risks collapsing any friendship between Anya and Damian because now she’s too overwhelmed to handle the task well–and, you know, she’s a kid, ease up–and, more importantly, risks harm to Anya because he, as her dad, is pressuring her.
That’s not even getting into the problems of Twilight doing all of this so he can pressure his daughter to dance with this boy she has problems with.
I get that this is believable: of course Twilight still falls into the bad habits of bad parenting and just being bad as a person and as a spy–progress does mean slipping back into bad habits. But when combined with how much pressure he’s putting onto Anya to dance with Damian, it is hard not to be uncomfortable with how to read this as a father trying to hook his daughter up with some boy.
I think Brklynking93 at the Viz comments section put it very well, so I’m going to bounce off of their ideas: Damian is such a jerk that I ask, why should we want to see her with Damian, let alone have Damian be the first to learn her secret?
It feels like all of this is less because Anya wants to reach out and save Damian from the pressures of his family, and more because she herself is the one pressured by her family to fulfill her father’s mission.
In fact (and maybe this was apparent in Chapter 96 and it’s my fault for not noticing it), that really should be the commonality to link Damian and Anya, not necessarily as a future couple but as having a bond through shared experience: they both have such pressure to live up to their fathers’ expectations, and that commiseration is what unites them. But then we would end up making Twilight even more unlikable, and I can only take so much.
Akane-banashi Chapter 104
Let’s wrap up with very brief remarks about Akane-banashi Chapter 104.
I am probably missing something again, as I didn’t keep an eye on how Taizen used to perform, so now his more animated features when performing don’t hit me the same way that they do for the surprised Chocho and Tohru.
The ending does pull off the shared drink the trio didn’t get to enjoy upon the shared graduation they were denied.
Wrapping Up
That’s all for this weekend–thanks for reading to the end.
Are you sold on the Nico x Ichico relationship? What am I missing?
And what did you think of this weekend’s other new manga releases? Has All For One overstayed his welcome? Am I too harsh on Twilight? What do you think about Taizen as a rakugo performer?
Let me know in the comments section or email me, derek.s.mcgrath@gmail.com.
Please look forward to future writing, as well as a livestream next Sunday at 11 AM Eastern on YouTube and Twitch in reaction to the newest Bungo Stray Dogs chapter.
And paraphrasing what I say at the end of livestreams:
Until next Sunday, if you can register to vote, check your voter registration at vote.org, campaign for Democrats at postcardstovoters.org, vote for Democrats, consider running for office to help Democrats…
And stay safe out there, people: mask up, get vaccinated, install adblockers, campaign against fascism and war and genocide and terrorism, and learn and practice anti-bigotry. I’ve been Derek S. McGrath. You have a good week ahead. Bye.
Derek S. McGrath 