manga: Wallflower Vol 19-20

It is, perhaps, a good thing that I wasn’t able to read volume 19 when it first came out (or close to it) as Noi doesn’t show up in these volumes until halfway through volume 20. While Noi isn’t my favorite character, she’s rather like Moko in Skip-Beat, where a large part of my fondness has to do with her role in the series, and her friendship with the main character. Except that the absence of, you know, anything resembling consistent plot of character progression or arcs makes me crankier when Noi is absent for long.

For the curious, yes, Tomoko Hayakawa remains the world’s laziest manga artist this side of Tite Kubo, battling it out with him over who has a greater aversion to drawing more than the sparsest of backgrounds. (Now, if it’s a fight between the leads, then I’m afraid Sunako beats Ichigo based on stubbornness and a greater willingness to fight dirty. That, and I’m not sure Ichigo has really figured out how to hit girls yet…)

( spoilers )

Inda by Sherwood Smith

Inda is the second son of the Prince of Choraed Elgaer. According to tradition, his older brother, Tanrid, is to train at the military academy, while Inda is to be trained at home, and become Tanrid’s champion when he inherits. By royal decree, however, second sons are now to attend the academy, too, and so off Inda goes, only to become the target of merciless bullying and multiple beatings. Every boy who befriended a boy nicknamed Sponge was the target of abuse, the goal to either make them turn on Sponge, or to hurt Sponge by hurting his friends, with either outcome acceptable. Targeting Sponge is especially strange, given that Sponge is the king’s second son, and even moreso because the source of the abuse was Sponge’s own brother.

This is a strong departure from Smith’s YA books, which (the ones I’ve read, at least) tend to be fairly contained medieval-lite books about girls on adventures. Smith doesn’t shy away from making her leads suffer, there, but none of it compares to what she puts Inda through. In addition, this is a hugely complex book. In complete honesty, I couldn’t keep everyone and their names, positions and relationships straight in the first half of the book, which focuses primarily on the brutal military academy. Later, when Inda’s life takes another turn (the book starts when he’s ten, and ends when he is, I think, about sixteen) it gets easier for me as only a few characters at a time are focused on.

Inda is the central character, but there’s no feeling of “destined hero” about him so far. Just a smart kid who got the short end of the stick a few times because he stuck by his friend. My favorites, though, are his friends Tau and Jeje, and his sister, Hadrid, who taught him how to fight, and seems to be Sponge’s protector.

Professions aren’t divided between men and women, and there are a lot female sailors, warriors, and business women. There are also male and female whores, and it’s considered as natural for women to visit a brothel as it is men. Homosexuality also seems to be widely accepted (and bisexuality exists, and is normal), in the societies focused on here, at least (I understand that other books in the series differ some, in these areas) with the only concern voiced over it regarding the sexual preferences of the princes.

There are also secret societies of women, and secret ways of fighting and secret histories only the women know. Like the fact that rape and sexual molestation/harassment in general are almost completely alien concepts due to earlier women killing sexual predators until the instinct was bred out of society. This is, I think, the only fantasy series that created a medieval-based world with a hefty dose of gender equality and explained how something that follows the basic rules of a patriarchal, sexist society didn’t turn out that way.

This is the first in a four book series, the last of which recently came out in hardcover.