Master’s degree in literature; critic of otaku culture, literature, and the arts.
Translator’s note: ACG stands for animation, comics, and games.
Recently I came across this article:
Qilu Xianzhi: The Opposition and Unity of Attributes and Humanity
I was a little surprised when I saw it. The question of characterhood1 is crucial to otaku criticism, and it also lies at the heart of another question: the literariness of light novels and manga. Could the author have thought his way to this level entirely on his own? That possibility drew me into the article. By the time I finished, however, I found that it had never reached that level.
Attributes and Reasons
The article dresses itself up in mangled philosophical terminology and makes things very complicated. All it is really saying is that giving characters a past, and their attributes a cause, can make their portrayal richer and more coherent. This has nothing to do with humanity; at most, one might stretch it into a connection with rationality. By the author’s own definition of humanity—“a system of thought whose workings can be traced”—he is effectively saying that every action and aspect of a person’s character has a definite explanation in that person’s past. But this rationalist view of human beings has few advocates these days. We might even say that nothing resembles a fictional character more closely than this rational person whom we can grasp with such certainty. And that raises another question: if this humanity is merely a supplement to attributes, how does it come into opposition with them?
Much of the article’s second half is, in fact, confused. Why should filling in the past that shaped Yukimura’s attributes in Haganai: I Don’t Have Many Friends cause her to struggle? Why should filling in Masuzu’s past in Oreshura make her waver? Why should an interpretation of Eriri’s attributes in Saekano: How to Raise a Boring Girlfriend become a constraint on her? The author uses terms such as “the unity of opposites” to describe the relationship between attributes and humanity. Yet his sequence of “laying the groundwork—interpretation—elevation” contains no sign of the “antithesis” required by Hegelian philosophy’s “thesis–antithesis–synthesis.” His definition of attributes is also problematic: attributes exclude proof, or, in other words, the reasons and past behind them. But a very simple example exposes a contradiction in this definition: must the childhood-friend attribute exclude the past?
Perhaps what this author really wants to discuss is not the transformation of attributes into humanity, but the overcoming of attributes. In the vocabulary of otaku criticism, this is the question of characters overcoming their own characterhood—and, at the same time, the question of the literariness of light novels and manga.
Signs and Death
Eiji Ōtsuka discusses these questions at length in Atomu no meidai (“The Atom Proposition”). Early animation and manga characters could not die. Flattened, burned to ashes, or covered in bandages, they would recover instantly in the next frame.
The pro-regime manga popular in wartime Japan used precisely this reduction to signs to conceal the reality of war. Enemies hit by bullets would merely shout “Ouch! Ouch!” without bleeding; soldiers would never truly be injured. Growing up in this cultural environment, the young Tezuka naturally inherited the same techniques. In his early manga exercise Till the Day of Victory, Osamu Tezuka follows this approach almost throughout. In the panel shown here, however, he unexpectedly breaks free of its shackles: for the first time, he depicts a character, an immortal sign, being shot by Mickey Mouse in a fighter plane and bleeding. To depict death through signs that conceal death, to depict real bleeding through fictional characters—Ōtsuka holds this contradictory mode of representation in high regard.
In Ambassador Atom, Tezuka tells the following story. Having lost his child, Dr. Tenma builds the robot Atom in the child’s image. But because Atom is a robot and cannot grow, Tenma becomes angry and abandons him. One day, aliens attack Earth, and the abandoned Atom takes on the responsibility of serving as ambassador in negotiations with them. When they finally reach a reconciliation, the aliens give Atom a head with an “adult face” as a token of thanks.
Ōtsuka reads this as a story in which Atom, a robot destined never to grow as a human would, nevertheless attains growth symbolically. The contradiction between the sign = attribute = defining premise that he cannot grow and his wish to grow coincides with the image of Japan under GHQ, the Allied occupation headquarters. Ōtsuka therefore regards this contradiction confronting Atom—between sign = attribute = defining premise and wish—as the fundamental problem of postwar manga. In How to Make Character Novels (Kyarakutā shōsetsu no tsukurikata), he argues that light novels, as a form of “sketching from life” that takes manga as its subject, inherit manga’s concern with these problems. Here, too, lies the literariness of light novels.
Kaguya-sama’s Verdict
To put it another way, take a character with the tsundere attribute. Explaining the origins of that attribute can indeed enrich her portrayal. But the attribute’s greatest appeal lies in the contradiction between her fundamental inability to overcome it and her wish to do so. Louise in Zero’s Familiar, for example, undoubtedly wants to convey her feelings to Saito, yet she cannot get them across. She wants to be frank but cannot express herself frankly: affection turns into violence, words of love into “Idiot!” And her inability to be frank leaves her full of regret and inner conflict. This complex of feelings about her own attributes, this coexistence of characterhood/attributes and wishes, is what makes a character most compelling as a fictional being. The same is true of Yukimura, Masuzu, Eriri, and Kaguya-sama. What draws us most is not how they acquired their present attributes, but their efforts to overcome them, their regret when they fail, and their agitation as they reflect.
For Kaguya-sama, chapter 43 of Kaguya-sama: Love Is War may be the best example. In the courtroom inside her head, Prosecutor Kaguya represents her prescribed aloofness and the premise that love is war, while Defense Counsel Kaguya represents her feelings for President Shirogane. The two battle it out over whether to give the president cake. After more than ten pages of debate, Defendant Kaguya asks Chief Justice Kaguya for a verdict.
The aloof Prosecutor Kaguya, the lovestruck Defense Counsel Kaguya, and the innocent Chief Justice Kaguya are all herself. They are all Defendant Kaguya herself, distraught over the contradiction between the premises that define her and what she wants. Kaguya finally resolves to give the president cake. Although her speech is still as aloof as ever, her every gesture blossoms with passion in the darkness.
And the outcome of this round of romantic warfare is unexpected—
In-panel verdict, translated: “Today’s result: victory for the Kaguyas.”
This time, the battle is not between Kaguya and Shirogane, but between Kaguya and herself. Nor is this a victory over someone else: it is a victory for the Kaguyas—for Kaguya herself over herself. It is also a typical attempt by a character to overcome her own characterhood amid inner conflict.
Itaru Hinoue’s Pixels
What draws us most is the conflict that arises as characters try to overcome their attributes, the complex emotional activity within them. This holds not only for tsundere characters but for other attributes as well. But what about this attribute: mukuchi, the taciturn character type? In our present context, the taciturn attribute is difficult to narrate. Such a character cannot be like Kaguya, aloof on the outside while a whole drama plays out within. In other words, interior monologue and polyphony are forbidden for this character type. Taciturnity concerns not only how little the character says, but also the narration presented to the reader: psychological description of the taciturn character is forbidden. Does this mean, then, that such a character cannot possess the conflicted interiority we have been discussing?
No, because a conflicted interiority need not be expressed through interior monologue. In The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya, for example, Nagato summons the courage to take hold of Kyon’s sleeve. That simple gesture is enough to convey the turbulence of her inner conflict. Or take Akane Satomura in ONE, one of Jun Maeda’s early works. As she gradually opens her heart to the protagonist, the changes in her inner life are never set out in long passages of psychological description. Instead, they appear in the minute changes to the character sprites drawn by Itaru Hinoue.
In “The Birth of a New Landscape: Sekai-kei Narratives and the Pathos Formula,” published in Shisō chizu (“Map of Thought”), vol. 4, the special issue on imagination, Yōhei Kurose quotes Shin Satō as follows:2
The moment an expression changes in pixel-sized increments, there is a thrill like successfully pulling off a combo in an action game. Take Akane Satomura in ONE: To the Radiant Season. There are scenes where you eat a boxed lunch together, and I think it is only around the third time that she shows you the faintest smile. Those slightly pursed lips should have given me no more than a little flutter of excitement, but I was so moved that I kept clenching my fists and crying, “Victory!” You could say I was dancing with joy over a tiny change of pixels in her expression (laughs). …
Satō’s reaction here—“dancing with joy over a tiny change of pixels in her expression”—is intriguing. Generally speaking, even heavily stylized manga and animation cannot disregard the skull and the coordinated movement of facial muscles when depicting human expressions. Bones, muscles, and expression are linked; if a drawing fails to balance them, the expression will look very strange. Thus, as Motonaga points out, bishōjo games have generally prepared multiple images for a character’s expressions—joy, anger, sorrow, pleasure—and switched out the character sprite itself to suit the circumstances in the script. But in works by Key and Leaf, changes of expression resemble limited animation: a faint blush on the cheeks, or a slight movement at the corner of the mouth. They are conveyed through minute alterations like these. The reason this technique does not produce strange expressions, but instead successfully depicts and communicates subtle emotional changes, is precisely that it introduces an interface for depicting human facial expressions through “changes in units of pixels.” In other words, just as with the transformation of “word roots” in the theory of the pathos formula,3 Hinoue redefines the concept of the “face”: what was governed by the skull and facial muscles becomes a plane controlled by a grid of pixels. A wholly new scale of reality is introduced here: a shift of one or two pixels is enough to give the impression of a change in expression.
Hinoue’s distinctive mode of expression, and the distinctive scale of reality it brings with it, do much the same thing as Nagato’s small gesture in the example above: they express complex inner changes through minute outward ones. Or rather, it is precisely the constraint imposed by the taciturn attribute that makes this mode of expression possible. Without the attribute’s suppression of emotion and psychological description, the effect of these minute changes would never be magnified to such an extent. Perhaps we can also put it this way: a character is destined never to escape the shackles of the taciturn attribute, and overcoming it can find expression only in this minute form. Yet precisely because the victory is minute, its effect is immense. The attribute thus becomes a basic condition of that immense effect, the prerequisite for our dancing with joy over that tiny change in pixels.
Characterhood and Literariness
One final point: whether a character ultimately overcomes their own attributes is not the issue. What matters, in the process of overcoming them, is the character’s reflection on their own characterhood and their inner conflict over it. Such reflection and conflict require the existence of interiority—that is, an “I” = subject. Modern literature, as Kōjin Karatani puts it, is the discovery of interiority = subject. And the activities of reflection and inner conflict signify precisely the discovery and acquisition of the “I.” Characters in light novels and manga are only signs; signs can depict only fiction, not reality. Yet as modern literature took shape, reality was established precisely within the artificially constructed language we call the genbun itchi style—the style of “unified speech and writing.” The Western subject = “I” was first introduced into Japan through modern literature written in this artificial language. Thus the “I,” interiority, the subject, even a modern image of the human being, contained a fictional = character aspect from their very beginnings. To depict the “I” as fictional, the “I” as a character, is therefore also part of literature. We can empathize with characters and feel a resonance with their inner conflicts not because they have passed from fiction into reality, nor because they have acquired humanity, but because some reality, some humanity, was contained in fiction from the beginning. This is the context in which Ōtsuka’s account of the literariness of light novels and manga is grounded. In the final chapter of How to Make Character Novels, he writes—
Those of you who aspire to write character novels (light novels) should not be afraid of their becoming “literature.” A novel can perfectly well be both excellent character merchandise and literature. Rather, this is how an author ought to fulfill responsibilities to readers and to society alike.
We should not discard characterhood/attributes as mere “commercialization” or “debasement.” On the contrary, they are one of the basic conditions that allow a work to be both commercial and literary.