JAPAN GIVES GIRLS AWESOMER ANGSTY ORIGINS AND THAT'S THAT!!!

[meganbmoore]

So, I am 20 minutes into the jmovie Azumi and have officially added Azumi to the shortlist of Supremely Awesome Angsty origins.

So, Azumi is found on the beach as a little girl with her mother's corpse.  The guy who found her was collecting kids to raise to be assassins.  Apparently one of the Tokugawa shoguns (ah...uhm...I was lazy and didn't note which!) told one of his warriors to find kids and raise them to be assassins and wipe out all the warlords who opposed them.  This was so urgent that it could wait a good 10-15 years.

ANYWAY!

Azumi and one of the other kids, Nachi, do the whole "childhood angty true love hanfholding" thing and walk off together and grow up into Ueto Aya and Oguri Shun.  Possibly I understand now why youtube is often filled with shipper fanfic vids of those two, as they have pretty decent chemistry.  Azumi is stoic angsty and Nachi is sweet and open angsty.

As a final lesson, their master tells them to pair up with their favorite other assassin in training, and then tells them to kill their partner.

OH NOES!

ANGST!

So Azumi and Nachi stand there staring stares of angsty denial at each other while there's a slow montage of their friends killing each other, and then Nachi says they both want to live  to get revenge and one has to live and get revenge for both and then Azumi kills him and stands there with his blood splattered all over her while he gives her a necklace as he dies that I'm sure will be very important later.

Oh, and then the survivors burn down their cabin to make sure we understand how tragic and angsty it is!

...

Ok, fine, typing it up, I realize it is more generic in words than it is awesome as you watch.

But the entire cast of Claymore still proves the subject line to be true!

Comments

[salimbol.livejournal.com]

Yeah, come to think of it, that was a pretty good opening section! I watched that back in the days before I knew who Oguri Shun was (yes, back in the Dark Ages, that was), so I can't say that he himself left much of an impression on me. My main memory of the film itself was that it was a very solid piece of cheese :-), and I quite liked it.
I've gotta get onto more Claymore; I've only seen the first episode of the anime to date, and you always make it sound so good.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

I learned about it looking for other stuff he's been in. Shun is pretty good at only being noticed as much as he wants to be in a role.

Claymore is currently my current favorite shounen manga.

[salimbol.livejournal.com]

Gasp! Do you mean to say it's beaten out SDK???

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

I love SDK, but it's never quite been my favorite shounen, despite a few very enthusiastic periods. As much as I love large parts of it, Kamijyo is really bad a "Character complexity" shorthands (see: Yukimura and a lot of the Mibu) and it's one of those things where it all falls apart if you remove one or two things. (Take out Kyo/Yuya and it's not really worth reading anymore. Not because of shippiness, but because pretty much everything in the main story is built around that...remove "Yuya is Kyo's girlie" and you'd basically have Kyo travelling around and ignoring everyone, or fighting them and moving on, and never building up his posse or having the motivation that gets him to a lot of important points.)

[salimbol.livejournal.com]

Well, well, I am surprised! And yet it's hard to deny the truth of some of that; the character development and exploration is certainly there, but it's also subsumed to a large extent by the demands of the Shounen Retard manga (fight, fight, fight!).
No Kyo/Yuya is unthinkable for SDK. People are free to dislike her if they want (though does anyone actually dislike her? She's fundamentally likeable, I would have said), but most of the story wouldn't be happening without her.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Yuya is a shounen female (and therefore required by the genre to not be allowed to fight a lot and to need some rescuing) whom the main character is blatantly in love with and obviously has a huge thing for almost from the beginning, who is central to the plot, and who many other characters blatantly adore, not to mention most of the cast ships Kyo/Yuya. Of course people dislike her.

Never mind that a lot of the plot is built around her even more than Kyo, and that, aside from Kyo, Aka, and Kyoshiro, you could remove any other character completely and have little affect on the plot, but you lose the plot altogether if there's no Yuya.

[salimbol.livejournal.com]

Yuya, we love you even if others don't! I can't imagine SDK working without Yuya; you've said often enough that she's the glue that binds the group together at least as much as Kyo. Kyo may be what brings the other guys in, but I think you could argue that Yuya is what keeps them there.
It's sad that shounen females don't get the love they deserve; I think so many of them rock, despite the fact (or perhaps even because of the fact) that they're constrained into certain roles by being women-in-shounen.