Tag: shonen jump

Boruto’s Contrast with Naruto

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Three updates so soon

This was about to be last week’s post, but I didn’t think it fair to talk about the same thing thrice in such a short amount of time. I’d been meaning to move onto other manga/anime/entertainment, etc. and I don’t really want to be the Boruto guy. I take in as much of the series as I can when I can, but I don’t want to sound like it’s the only thing I take in; my previous posts suggest otherwise.

That being said, the above meme gets to the heart of what this post will be about and the fanfare from the release of the latest chapter on Sunday put so much of the community into a frenzy that there were more people who read Boruto than One Piece.

At one point, the Boruto fans claimed the last chapter alone trounced all of One Piece which isn’t so much a shot for the moon from the Earth as it’s a shot to the sun from Planet X. I liked the last chapter a lot, but I wouldn’t say it was that good.

As for the topic this week: Momoshiki’s prediction in like Volume 3 of the manga comes true in the most recent chapter. I’ll put links down below so that readers can see for themselves what he’s been talking about all along:

https://www.viz.com/shonenjump/boruto-chapter-79/chapter/26473

https://w2.boruto-online.com/manga/boruto-manga-chapter-79/

And for those of you who care little for spoilers, picking up from 77 and 78, after Kawaki comes to the conclusion that the life of a shinobi is not a pleasant one, he prefaces his plans to Naruto and Hinata by announcing first that in any other circumstance he would never wish harm against Boruto, but him being part Ohtsutsuki and a vessel for Momoshiki to boot has forced hand, literally as we see later. Distraught, neither the Seventh Hokage nor his wife take kindly to Kawaki’s plans and the boy, expecting this resistance, sends the pair to another dimension, hoping to complete his mission unimpeded by the Hidden Leaf Village’s most powerful ninja.

Catching up to Boruto and Sarada, Kawaki strikes, awarding Boruto his new scar only to be apprehended by Sasuke, Shikamaru, and Mitsuki. However, it’s established in an earlier chapter that when Boruto’s chakra reserves are diminished, Momoshiki takes control, as noted by the Jougan’s appearance in Boruto’s right eye. Kawaki breaks free and flees. Eida senses danger coming his way, and catches up to him. Unconsciously, she activates a shinjutsu or god technique known as Omnipotence that reverses Boruto’s and Kawaki’s roles: Kawaki is the one who’s now the son of Naruto Uzumaki and Hinata Hyuga, while Boruto is the nobody, the outcast vessel of Kara and Isshiki Ohtsutsuki while he controlled Jigen’s body.

It’s also worth mentioning that the Boruto anime, which airs on Sundays, released a new episode the same day as Chapter 79, so fans got a glimpse of what Momoshiki meant when he made his prophecy while also watching Kawaki try the first time to rid the world of Momoshiki’s presence. I know they’re not meant to be the highlight of Boruto anymore, but the OG Team 7 and the Sixth Hokage could simply tell Kawaki and the new Team 7 why killing an Ohtsutsuki is so tough. It’s like fighting a necromancer: if you kill the necromancer and it’s easy, you didn’t kill him. Am I right, Quan Chi?

So now that we have this set up, I want to try to make predictions. With the announcement a few weeks ago that Boruto’s Part 1 was ending soon, what we know so far is that Boruto lost everything. He’s his father’s son in appearance and often personality, but Naruto grew up a few years and change after the Third Shinobi War ended. Select shinobi who taught or de facto raised him like Kakashi and Jiraiya are war veterans themselves from that conflict or an earlier conflict; Kakashi himself was a child soldier from the Third War. Including teachers, the OG characters from Naruto are in some manner a victim of loss on either a wide or miniature scale.

Boruto doesn’t know that world and neither does his generation. Relatively speaking there’s peace all around, except for one or two bands of rogue ninja. Fifteen years after the devastation of the Fourth Shinobi War, and the peace that Nagato, Jiraiya, and everyone ever wanted has come to fruition thanks in no small part to the will of a knuckleheaded ninja. As a result, Boruto’s generation doesn’t need more shinobi to fill in a gap or because there’s a war on the horizon in need of some fresh meat; it’s mostly general security and escort missions or at least that’s how they always begin. A simple security mission can easily turn sour depending on several conditions. Remember the Mujina bandits?

Now that Boruto’s lost everything he’s ever had, the only route fans can see going forward is that Boruto follows the path of a rogue shinobi, like Sasuke did but with a significant point of divergence. Sasuke chose to acquire power from Orochimaru to get revenge on Itachi; Boruto had this move forced on him by an omnipotent power that honestly no one understands all that well. Another adverse effect of the Omnipotence shinjutsu is that Ohtsutsuki members and their vessels don’t succumb to Eida’s charm ability. Interestingly, Sumire and Sarada are also immune to this ability, which some on r/Boruto have theorized that since she treated these two as friends, they were spared that outcome.

Call it a miscalculation, but has anything good ever happened when children activate godly powers? In all seriousness, this would mean that one or both of them is likely to join up with Boruto for the foreseeable future while he plots to undo Kawaki’s crimes. Whether this extends to the remnants of the Ohtsutsuki remains to be seen. Sarada might go with Boruto, but if her father falls under the same charm as most people then he’ll likely fight her tooth and nail to keep her in the village. Sakura as well.

Sumire could also join Boruto’s quest since the anime gave her a burden of her own to deal with early on in the show’s run in the form of Nue and her father’s connection to the Foundation, the ANBU cell independent of the Hokage’s control. But this could also go wrong as the show rectified the rampage from that arc and allowed her to return to the life she’d gained in the Ninja Academy, even letting her work as an assistant to Dr. Katasuke Tohno in the manga.

These would be unlikely if they join Boruto in defiance of the Hidden Leaf Jonin. If it were a mission, since Boruto is now perceived as an enemy at the terrorist level, it would be an A-rank mission with S-rank potential and only the most advanced level shinobi would be selected for such a mission. It’s not like when Shikamaru’s rag-tag team fought off the Sound Ninja 4 to get Sasuke back. They village might choose to see it as potentially more dangerous, even for a Chunin like Sarada.

But if they see her potential and do what Hiruzen did with Itachi and make it an undercover/double agent mission like the Uchiha Clan Downfall, then I could see it happening… under Naruto and in response to what happened to his son. Assuming Shikamaru becomes interim Hokage or Kakashi or Tsunade return to their roles, they’d be under the influence of Omnipotence and Shikamaru has shown himself to be way more risk-averse as advisor to the Hokage. Just as he’d wanted to do to Kawaki, he probably won’t stop until Boruto is apprehended, however that comes about.

Also consider the reaction/response to come from the Hyuga clan when they find out their former heiress is missing, or whether the Omnipotence transcends dimensions. Hanabi and Hiashi are the only two Hyuga clan members to appear in the anime and I don’t think ever in the Boruto manga. Compared to the other Hidden Leaf clans, the Hyuga are still intact and kicking, especially with members of theirs amongst the regular Hidden Leaf Jonin in other aspects. A large pool of veteran shinobi to answer to this emergency should be expected.

In the meantime, with Himawari now technically an orphan, she might be taken into the Hyuga clan grounds for her protection and further training as an established academy student and aspiring shinobi. She does have the Byakugan unlike her brother and if they deem her ready, may induct her as a shinobi no different than the others who serve the Hidden Leaf Village.

If Omnipotence transcends dimensions, then that means Kawaki is safe in the short-term but screwed in the long-term. He advised Eida to report Naruto and Hinata (who are in another dimension remember) dead, so he and Eida could be in it if they find out that it’s a lie.

This all remains to be seen, though. We have until April 20 to see what happens, and I may have more material to write about. You know how I wrote up above that I didn’t really want to be seen as the Boruto guy? That might be in my future the more I bring it up. But again we’ll have to wait and see.

Akane-banashi

Tiberius1 Comment

Bringing rakugo to modern readers

I put this off last week to make way for the surprise announcement of Boruto’s Part 1 ending, but with that next chapter’s leaks following so close and a surprise twist at the end, I find myself pushing next week’s topic back again to make room for this because it’s too much to ignore. When Boruto Raiden or whatever Part 2 is gonna be called returns, I’ll probably devote a wider post to that, but until then here’s the gist of Masashi Kishimoto as of late: sporadic.

Now to something I was going to write about last week.

Sometime last year while browsing the Viz website, the debut chapter of a manga known as Akane-banashi was released. The series about the titular character, Akane Osaki, and her journey to become a rakugoka. Rakugo is a type of Japanese storytelling. Practitioners known as rakugoka tell long and ridiculous comedic stories in the seiza sitting position with a paper fan and different tones of voice to denote multiple characters in the story. It’s like standup comedy if you remove the standing.

From what I understand, these stories most often consist of old Japanese legends, myths and folktales, largely influenced by the culture that developed in Japan over the millennia. Quick research tells me that Akane-banashi isn’t the first manga to feature the art of rakugo, the others like Descending Stories were just geared toward older readers or were drawn decades ago and would thus be hard to find outside of an antique shop.

I don’t have a solid answer for how Akane-banashi took off the way it did a year and change later, but I have a few theories: the protagonist is a young woman just learning the ropes instead of a middle-aged or old man who’s already an expert/master; it runs concurrent with some other solid manga that debuted recently so there’s a healthy lineup to thumb through. These are my theories and I expect them to be wrong or inaccurate as I hadn’t taken an interest in rakugo until I stumbled upon Akane-banashi.

In a further demonstration of my limited exposure to rakugo manga (perhaps highlighted by how so few of them there are available for my research), the introductions to rakugo are lacking or brief. The manga explains the ranks of the rakugoka, select stories that a rakugoka is likely to tell (potentially first-time viewers have an idea of what to expect when they go see a performance in real life), and the different ways a story can be told in the rakugo form. This all sounds like a lot, but it’s all so brief by virtue of manga being a visual medium that all things considered Akane-banashi could be taken as a pick-up-and-read style manga. Part of me is curious if a kabuki manga would do the same thing.

Regarding the depiction of exceptionally niche topics in media, the shallow pool of practitioners within a given medium make it hard for outsiders looking in to judge the translation from real life to print, despite their best efforts to research it by any means. In the case of the wider performing arts, in the west and westernized countries with a healthy performing arts/entertainment industry, everyone and their grandmother at least knows one or a few people who’ve tried their hand at it from stage plays to big budget multimillion dollar silver screen productions to varying degrees of success. You don’t even need to be an A-list actor to know what it’s like or what to expect. Well-read individuals can educate themselves from true stories and popular rumors about what goes on in the film industry, especially in Hollywood where most of the movies are made, often to varying degrees of success. As a result, the lay person outside that world probably knows what obstacles a performer faces–but it takes sitting down with a performer or becoming one yourself to know about another layer that’s not as often exposed.

Consider this: actors don’t typically work a traditional 9-5 job. They would often be on-call and working with talent managers and/or companies who can help them land a role of some kind. For filming, almost anything goes. Filming at night? In traffic? On a mountain? With dangerous animals? Is the director denying you sleep for a certain scene? All of these may be extreme examples varying depending on the creativity of the actor or director, but all in all, circumstances like these would be seen as unnatural to those of us who aren’t performers, but largely run-of-the-mill shenanigans in the long run. Methodical madness and all that.

If Akane-banashi is even partly true to life, then accordingly, there’s no real wrong way to tell a story. A testament to a writer’s ability would be if historical events could be reworded to be even more interesting than what actually happened without resorting to exaggerations or outright lies. One such example that comes to mind for me would be Baz Luhrmann’s take on Romeo and Juliet. The original play was set in Renaissance Italy, but Luhrmann sets it in modern-day SoCal with the Montagues and Capulets being warring gangs instead of noble families.

Anything is possible.

Akane-banashi seems to be veering towards the direction of reinventing the wheel on rakugo as a whole and the stories that can be told in this style. All in all, it appears to be flipping the tradition of rakugo on its head, and while I’m slacking on the manga itself, whenever I get the chance I hope to be able to follow up on where it goes from here.

Undead Unluck Anime Adaptation Confirmed?

Tiberius1 Comment

An obscure manga may be due for an obscure anime adaptation.

Currently on vacation so this might be a quick post with little detail. The end summary will make all the difference.

In January of 2020 whilst browsing the Shonen Jump section of viz.com, I was introduced to that month’s debut manga called Undead Unluck. It opens with our character Fuuko Izumo finishing a romance manga and then declaring to the public that she will end her own life. Dramatic? Yes, but she does have an explanation for this. When she physically interacts with people, the person who touched her suffers a proportional amount of misfortune depending on how long, how she was touched, and with what. Brushing up against someone while navigating a crowded train might delay service; prolonged skin-to-skin contact meanwhile means unimaginably bad luck from an injury to a life-altering injury to sometimes death. And it can range from coincidentally realistic to balls to deez nuts ridiculous.

During this confrontation, the second of the titular duo, named Andy, strikes up a conversation and is initially repelled by Fuuko with the same hostility she showed to the others in the vicinity. He falls onto an incoming train and his body cracks the window, but he legit walks it off. Yep. Remember in Naruto when the Leaf ninja were sent to dispose of Hidan, but were continually baffled by his refusal to keel over? It was kind of like that, only Andy hasn’t seen the light of Jashin yet.

And this is how the manga begins. Fuuko begins it wishing to end her life and so does Andy, but his problem is he’s basically Hidan or Deadpool with different rules. As the manga goes along, it’s revealed piecemeal that Andy has a lot of baggage from his life, and he hopes to reach his goal of sweet death by wooing Fuuko along the way. The proportionality is no joke. If intimate contact can topple a building without warning, then according to Andy, rounding third base especially with no condoms should bring about the intensity of Fimbulwinter. Basically, they’re both hoping to go out with a bang. No pun intended.

Fuuko’s and Andy’s abilities of misfortune and immortality surprisingly don’t make them all that special as there are others with similar supernatural abilities that are described as a single word but with the prefix Un- in front of it. Undead, unluck, unbreakable, unjust, untruth, unknown, that sort of thing. It’s a bizarre, indescribable manga that’s best experienced by reading it. I recall going to the Viz Media website to read a chapter weekly that year as the pandemic intensified. In the summer of 2021, this became unachievable as my brief experience with Army basic training by nature limited my access to technology, and keeping up with the outside world doesn’t happen during basic training. After returning from that experience, I found trouble keeping up with the manga as I’d missed so much. These days, I tune in a few times to see what’s going on. I’ll be missing context from one or five or an entire volume’s worth of chapters, but it’s still good reading and reading between the lines as well as a summary from the wiki can help.

Fast-forward to January of this year, and I learn that along the horizon, an anime adaptation is on the table.

Normally, when it comes to burgeoning manga that I lay my eyes on, I’m a historically terrible judge of character. Some manga I wanted to succeed get cancelled twenty chapters in, and others I don’t pay much attention to seem to blow up overnight. Everyone knows who Loid, Yor, and Anya all are because Spy x Family is a massive hit with a solid adaptation to boot, but I’m pretty sure only seven people will have ever heard of Black Torch or Time Paradox Ghostwriter, and I’m one of those seven.

It’s one thing to misjudge the success of something, but this one seems to be completely out of left field until you see what studio is said to be captaining the ship. It’s the same one that fixed with A.P.P.P. broke in the 1990s, the one that got a legendary underground manga to go mainstream for the first time in almost 25 years, the same one that copied Hokuto no Ken‘s homework. You know the one.

Yes, if things go as planned and Undead Unluck goes from print to animation cel to pirate streaming site, David Production will take full responsibility for converting more anime onlies to another underground manga. David Pro has a set standard for adaptations. JoJo’s shown above and Fire Force are the only two anime that I know they worked on, but the quality of both speaks for themselves. The adaptation of Part 6 Stone Ocean can be seen as controversial within the JoJo community over the amount of CG in select episodes coupled with Netflix’s outdated batch release formula that may or may not have influenced the direction of the adaptation. The same can be said about Fire Force’s fanservice, but above all, save for a few tweaks and changes from manga panel to animation cel is nearly 1 to 1. And there’s normally an explanation for a change anyway.

Actually, changes in continuity aren’t all that uncommon or interesting when it comes to an adaptation of anything. It mostly only matters if the adaptation and the source material are on different wavelengths. For Undead Unluck, I can expect the anime to be as faithful to the manga as possible with a few changes here and there. As of writing this, YouTube and Google feed me articles and teasers with short scenes and demos of the anime to come with no real word on the adaptation to speak of in any significant detail. This can be understandable or suspicious depending on several factors. In the gaming-sphere, all the scrutiny goes to the studio and its leadership if all their hard work is shown in a pre-rendered trailer that fakes the intensity of an upcoming video game.

But anime is more or less forgiven considering how dungeon-esque working conditions can look for animators, as well as studios being notoriously tightlipped about the quality of scenes who draws them all. It’s no secret that the folks at Wit, SHAFT, Aniplex, MAPPA, Pierrot, et al outsource some of their work to Good Korea, China, Thailand, and Vietnam, but whether your favorite arc is being drawn by Saigonese Gustav Klimt or the water buffalo filling in for him while he battles a case of ligma is up in the air. r/Boruto just found out why the anime’s been getting a glow up in recent episodes and it’s not just because Eida is a sexy she-devil. If what they say is true, then the Boruto anime might’ve been used for trainees from other studios.

But as I stated before, David Pro is on the case and living up to their goal of being like their biblical namesake, I don’t expect them to miss a beat. I’ll try my best to keep an eye out for more news on Unkillable + Unfortunate.