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Apr. 29th, 2011 10:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsPreviously, on After School Nightmare:
MASHIRO: I'm a boy, except I'm actually female from the waist down, don't ask me how that works. But I'M A BOY I'M A BOY I'M A BOY AND I AM GOING TO BE MANLY DAMMIT.
SOU: I am a jerkface playboy, and I am into you, Mashiro, and therefore I say you are a GIRL. And I will force makeouts on you to PROVE IT. I also have some darkly hinted-at Issues In My Past, but it will take a lot of work to make me sympathetic.
KUREHA: My issues are all actually there right in the first volume! I was raped and abused as a child, so I put on a fake cheerful super-feminine face while being inwardly terrified and furious all the time. But Mashiro being half girl makes me feel safe, so I've decided I'm totally in love with him.
MASHIRO: And protecting Kureha makes me feel manly! It's a great basis for a relationship.
CREEPY SCHOOL NURSE: Okay, kids, time to join the extra once-weekly class that shoves you into surreal dreamscapes, in a shape that reflects your deepest psychological issues, and requires you to destroy each other to find the key to the super-ambiguous and not-at-all-sinister 'graduation!' Once you've succeeded you'll disappear from the school and everyone will forget about you, but in theory you'll have achieved at least some kind of emotional catharsis, so . . . that's exciting?
MASHIRO: Wait, why does everyone else get to be things like disembodied hands and anonymous faceless knights and giant paper giraffes, and I'm just myself-as-a-girl so everybody in the class knows my deepest psychological issues? UNFAIR.
CREEPY SCHOOL NURSE: Sorry, kid, but you're the protagonist, so life's just going to have to be harder for you.
And then we launch into ten volumes of psychological surrealism, intense character development, gender issues being interestingly sort-of-explored and yet sort-of-weirdly-not, Mashiro being frustrating, KUREHA BECOMING AWESOME, and interesting characters rotating in and getting flung out of the series faster than you can remember their names. This is where the coherent bit of this entry ends.
Okay, so first of all I may as well talk about the ending and the reveal, which - I don't know how I feel about it! On the one hand, it certainly makes a weird kind of sense, and in a way more sense than I expected! On the other hand, there's something . . . oddly personality-deterministic about needing to defeat your own issues before you're born. Reincarnation is the only thing that seems to make it work for anyone other than Mashiro, although as far as I know reincarnation is not explicitly alluded to anywhere in the series.
(Also I was kind of expecting something creepier, so in a way it was almost a letdown that graduation wasn't more sinister. I mean, I guess near-prenatal-FIERY-DOOM is pretty sinister in its own way . . .)
On the other hand: KUREHA, SO AWESOME. It was actually Kureha that brought me around to liking Sou midway through the series; I was determined not to, tragic backstory issues or no, and then they started being adorable lunchtime buddies and I couldn't not!
I totally called that Sou was his sister in the dream - which makes me sound more knowing than I was, because I doubted myself a million times when they kept hammering home that he was THE KNIGHT THE KNIGHT THE KNIGHT. But him being the knight didn't make any sense really, it was way too easy. AND SPEAKING OF THE KNIGHT - good lord, the scene where whatsisface takes the key out of Mashiro is . . . not subtle, is it. Probably the most disturbing in the series! And there are a lot of pretty disturbing scenes!
Mashiro him/herself I kept waffling on. I do like how much the character flaws and the ways that Mashiro keeps on accidentally hurting other people while bumbling around were called out, though I think I was unfairly resentful that Mashiro NEVER APPRECIATED KUREHA ENOUGH for me. Not being into her is fine and makes perfect sense, but Mashiro was also a really crappy friend! And towards the end she seemed much more focused on Sou's feelings than Kureha's 90% of the time. (I guess I should refer to late-Mashiro as 'she'? It actually really surprised me what a hard time I had thinking of Mashiro as female, even after she explicitly changed her mind about it and decided to identify that way. I think because I spent so long going "it's okay, Mashiro, you can identify as male if you want to!" But then it didn't turn out to be about identification at all, which is . . . an interesting way of sidestepping the issue, really. I'm not sure how I feel about that either.)
My biggest disappointment with the series though was really wanting much more time with the relatively one-off characters who passed through the nightmare, and being sad when they vanished so quickly. Faceless girl! Crushing-on-Kureha-boy! Mermaid girl! The hands! PAPER GIRAFFE!
MASHIRO: I'm a boy, except I'm actually female from the waist down, don't ask me how that works. But I'M A BOY I'M A BOY I'M A BOY AND I AM GOING TO BE MANLY DAMMIT.
SOU: I am a jerkface playboy, and I am into you, Mashiro, and therefore I say you are a GIRL. And I will force makeouts on you to PROVE IT. I also have some darkly hinted-at Issues In My Past, but it will take a lot of work to make me sympathetic.
KUREHA: My issues are all actually there right in the first volume! I was raped and abused as a child, so I put on a fake cheerful super-feminine face while being inwardly terrified and furious all the time. But Mashiro being half girl makes me feel safe, so I've decided I'm totally in love with him.
MASHIRO: And protecting Kureha makes me feel manly! It's a great basis for a relationship.
CREEPY SCHOOL NURSE: Okay, kids, time to join the extra once-weekly class that shoves you into surreal dreamscapes, in a shape that reflects your deepest psychological issues, and requires you to destroy each other to find the key to the super-ambiguous and not-at-all-sinister 'graduation!' Once you've succeeded you'll disappear from the school and everyone will forget about you, but in theory you'll have achieved at least some kind of emotional catharsis, so . . . that's exciting?
MASHIRO: Wait, why does everyone else get to be things like disembodied hands and anonymous faceless knights and giant paper giraffes, and I'm just myself-as-a-girl so everybody in the class knows my deepest psychological issues? UNFAIR.
CREEPY SCHOOL NURSE: Sorry, kid, but you're the protagonist, so life's just going to have to be harder for you.
And then we launch into ten volumes of psychological surrealism, intense character development, gender issues being interestingly sort-of-explored and yet sort-of-weirdly-not, Mashiro being frustrating, KUREHA BECOMING AWESOME, and interesting characters rotating in and getting flung out of the series faster than you can remember their names. This is where the coherent bit of this entry ends.
Okay, so first of all I may as well talk about the ending and the reveal, which - I don't know how I feel about it! On the one hand, it certainly makes a weird kind of sense, and in a way more sense than I expected! On the other hand, there's something . . . oddly personality-deterministic about needing to defeat your own issues before you're born. Reincarnation is the only thing that seems to make it work for anyone other than Mashiro, although as far as I know reincarnation is not explicitly alluded to anywhere in the series.
(Also I was kind of expecting something creepier, so in a way it was almost a letdown that graduation wasn't more sinister. I mean, I guess near-prenatal-FIERY-DOOM is pretty sinister in its own way . . .)
On the other hand: KUREHA, SO AWESOME. It was actually Kureha that brought me around to liking Sou midway through the series; I was determined not to, tragic backstory issues or no, and then they started being adorable lunchtime buddies and I couldn't not!
I totally called that Sou was his sister in the dream - which makes me sound more knowing than I was, because I doubted myself a million times when they kept hammering home that he was THE KNIGHT THE KNIGHT THE KNIGHT. But him being the knight didn't make any sense really, it was way too easy. AND SPEAKING OF THE KNIGHT - good lord, the scene where whatsisface takes the key out of Mashiro is . . . not subtle, is it. Probably the most disturbing in the series! And there are a lot of pretty disturbing scenes!
Mashiro him/herself I kept waffling on. I do like how much the character flaws and the ways that Mashiro keeps on accidentally hurting other people while bumbling around were called out, though I think I was unfairly resentful that Mashiro NEVER APPRECIATED KUREHA ENOUGH for me. Not being into her is fine and makes perfect sense, but Mashiro was also a really crappy friend! And towards the end she seemed much more focused on Sou's feelings than Kureha's 90% of the time. (I guess I should refer to late-Mashiro as 'she'? It actually really surprised me what a hard time I had thinking of Mashiro as female, even after she explicitly changed her mind about it and decided to identify that way. I think because I spent so long going "it's okay, Mashiro, you can identify as male if you want to!" But then it didn't turn out to be about identification at all, which is . . . an interesting way of sidestepping the issue, really. I'm not sure how I feel about that either.)
My biggest disappointment with the series though was really wanting much more time with the relatively one-off characters who passed through the nightmare, and being sad when they vanished so quickly. Faceless girl! Crushing-on-Kureha-boy! Mermaid girl! The hands! PAPER GIRAFFE!
