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Aug. 15th, 2019 11:17 pmA few months ago, the new 7 Seeds anime launched on Netflix! I watched the first four episodes!
...then I fell headfirst into rereading all 35 volumes of the manga and have been spending most of my unscheduled time doing that for the last two months, finally actually getting all the way to the end, which the last time I did a massive 7 Seeds read had neither been written nor translated. I am happy to report: I love this manga even more than I did before! And I already loved it a lot.
(If you follow me on Twitter, none of this will be news to you, because I've been spamming my entire timeline with livetweets. Too bad! You're getting it again anyway!)
The premise of 7 Seeds: in the near future, the Earth gets hit with an enormous meteor. The government of Japan, in its infinite wisdom, attempts a number of increasingly absurd schemes to try to save humanity; unfortunately, the most absurd of all -- secretly freeze-drying small groups of unsuspecting teenagers in time capsules set to open after several millenia in hopes the Earth will once again be livable by then -- is the one that sticks.
Three of the five groups of kids are chosen through a combination of "which kids are famous?" and "which kids' parents have influence?", which yields a mix of confused and resentful piano prodigies, politician's daughters, tech-start-up wunderkind, and talented high school baseball players, but only one half-trained doomsday prepper.
The fourth group, Team Summer A, actually does get some doomsday prep; unfortunately, their preparation consists of a childhood of intensive paramilitary training followed by a brutal final exam that leaves them all possessed of great survival skills, zero social skills, and an enormous load of emotional trauma. This is understandably concerning to everyone else they meet.
And then there's Team Summer B, the control group -- a last minute afterthought by the designers of the project, who suddenly got genre-savvy and realized that the survival of the human race was absolutely going to depend on a plucky band of misfits.
Obviously, we start out with Summer B; gradually the rest of the teams are introduced and start bumping into each other, and plot unfolds from there, helped along by an assortment of natural and unnatural perils, an escalating series of really dramatic escape rooms, and everyone's colliding character development. Sometimes it is very funny! Sometimes it's emotionally devastating! Yumi Tamura loves bugs, bacteria, and dehydrated dinosaurs! ( Here's a collection of random panels I gathered during my reread, presented without context )
Horror and hijinks aside, though, the manga does some incredible long-game character development, as well as some of the most interesting work I've ever seen as far as negotiating the complexity of consequence. ( Emotional arc plot spoilers, no details )
I also really like how Yumi Tamura generally handles relationships. Obviously when you have 30 teens constantly getting into various high-adrenaline situations in different combinations there are going to be a lot of Intense Feelings all over the place, and certainly if you mapped it all out you could get a hilariously complicated love polygon diagram, but the thing that makes it work so well for me is that most of the relationships are undefinably intense -- most of the kids have at least three or four different dynamics that sit so exactly on the line between Romance and Intense Friendship that none of the participants themselves are sure exactly where they are, and it doesn't really matter in any case because the friendship is what's actually important.
Only six of the thirty kids in the cast end the manga in anything I would call a tidy pair. Everything else continues in a state of intense ambiguity where nothing is sure except that they Care About Some Of These Other Kids A Whole Lot, Maybe With Pants Feelings But Who Really Knows. Natsu happily pines after safely unattainable Arashi while accidentally becoming best friends with him instead; Ran has a perfectly fine co-dictatorship-with-benefits situation going on but the manga is way more interested in the fact that she's literally the only person her architect rival has ever cared about as a human; Hana and Aramaki both possess the fatal combination of being attractive, competent AND deeply emotionally needy and thus manage to trigger sparkly eyes and dokidoki hearts in literally everybody they meet (who doesn't want to murder them). That's fine! Go to town! It's the post-apocalypse and you're all seventeen and traditional monogamy has no place in the new world anyway; just ask Ayu, who's got a shortlist of candidates to co-parent her first and second children.
( For the five people who've already read the manga, I have more shipping opinions. )
...then I fell headfirst into rereading all 35 volumes of the manga and have been spending most of my unscheduled time doing that for the last two months, finally actually getting all the way to the end, which the last time I did a massive 7 Seeds read had neither been written nor translated. I am happy to report: I love this manga even more than I did before! And I already loved it a lot.
(If you follow me on Twitter, none of this will be news to you, because I've been spamming my entire timeline with livetweets. Too bad! You're getting it again anyway!)
The premise of 7 Seeds: in the near future, the Earth gets hit with an enormous meteor. The government of Japan, in its infinite wisdom, attempts a number of increasingly absurd schemes to try to save humanity; unfortunately, the most absurd of all -- secretly freeze-drying small groups of unsuspecting teenagers in time capsules set to open after several millenia in hopes the Earth will once again be livable by then -- is the one that sticks.
Three of the five groups of kids are chosen through a combination of "which kids are famous?" and "which kids' parents have influence?", which yields a mix of confused and resentful piano prodigies, politician's daughters, tech-start-up wunderkind, and talented high school baseball players, but only one half-trained doomsday prepper.
The fourth group, Team Summer A, actually does get some doomsday prep; unfortunately, their preparation consists of a childhood of intensive paramilitary training followed by a brutal final exam that leaves them all possessed of great survival skills, zero social skills, and an enormous load of emotional trauma. This is understandably concerning to everyone else they meet.
And then there's Team Summer B, the control group -- a last minute afterthought by the designers of the project, who suddenly got genre-savvy and realized that the survival of the human race was absolutely going to depend on a plucky band of misfits.
Obviously, we start out with Summer B; gradually the rest of the teams are introduced and start bumping into each other, and plot unfolds from there, helped along by an assortment of natural and unnatural perils, an escalating series of really dramatic escape rooms, and everyone's colliding character development. Sometimes it is very funny! Sometimes it's emotionally devastating! Yumi Tamura loves bugs, bacteria, and dehydrated dinosaurs! ( Here's a collection of random panels I gathered during my reread, presented without context )
Horror and hijinks aside, though, the manga does some incredible long-game character development, as well as some of the most interesting work I've ever seen as far as negotiating the complexity of consequence. ( Emotional arc plot spoilers, no details )
I also really like how Yumi Tamura generally handles relationships. Obviously when you have 30 teens constantly getting into various high-adrenaline situations in different combinations there are going to be a lot of Intense Feelings all over the place, and certainly if you mapped it all out you could get a hilariously complicated love polygon diagram, but the thing that makes it work so well for me is that most of the relationships are undefinably intense -- most of the kids have at least three or four different dynamics that sit so exactly on the line between Romance and Intense Friendship that none of the participants themselves are sure exactly where they are, and it doesn't really matter in any case because the friendship is what's actually important.
Only six of the thirty kids in the cast end the manga in anything I would call a tidy pair. Everything else continues in a state of intense ambiguity where nothing is sure except that they Care About Some Of These Other Kids A Whole Lot, Maybe With Pants Feelings But Who Really Knows. Natsu happily pines after safely unattainable Arashi while accidentally becoming best friends with him instead; Ran has a perfectly fine co-dictatorship-with-benefits situation going on but the manga is way more interested in the fact that she's literally the only person her architect rival has ever cared about as a human; Hana and Aramaki both possess the fatal combination of being attractive, competent AND deeply emotionally needy and thus manage to trigger sparkly eyes and dokidoki hearts in literally everybody they meet (who doesn't want to murder them). That's fine! Go to town! It's the post-apocalypse and you're all seventeen and traditional monogamy has no place in the new world anyway; just ask Ayu, who's got a shortlist of candidates to co-parent her first and second children.
( For the five people who've already read the manga, I have more shipping opinions. )
