What really fucks me up about the .Hack GU series is that it revolves around finding closure to the friends that have disappeared and the mysteries that have taken them from you. But in the campaign in finding truth you build relationships with other people who fight along side you even if the danger saturates itself beyond the parameter of being a game.

These people risk their life for you, because they love you and you build a mutual trusting relationship more meaningful than the ones you are desperately seeking answers for.

So when you finally get to the end you’re torn. The friends and loved ones are there and their disappearances explained and illnesses cured. But then your new companions don’t know anything about them except that they mean the world to you. All they know is that they might be losing you, someone they risked their lives for and spent the better part of several years with. How can you know what someone will do when they are reunited with someone they went to Hell and back for?

Not to mention this entire journey has warped you as a person. You can’t venture forth making meaningful connections with others on a day to day basis without changing, we as people are shaped by the people around us. Learning to trust, learning what makes your friends laugh, all these things and more slowly and surely change you.

So then, when you’ve rescued your friends what do you expect? Do you step away from them knowing full well that things can never be the way they were, or do you reach for the past with all your might and leave your new friends behind? Can a compromise of the two meet in any successful way to how the way things were suppose to be in your head when the whole quest started?

Maybe. But in these scenarios I find almost no happy ending.

thinking about the way yumi tamura uses narrative transitions…though they’re all beautiful, my favorite so far is the summer solstice interlude (chs. 67-69), which kicks off the combined settlement arc with a lack of fanfare that’s only really noteworthy on a reread considering what…happens in that arc

this is just an interstitial interlude, but it embeds a lot of interesting shifts in the simple act of handing off a baton from a summer b story (the team’s rescue and reunion) to a summer a one (the team’s first encounter with another person). it reintroduces motifs that acquire different connotations in context of the new story, switches the summer a expository narrator from ango to ayu, and hits a nice additional note complicating the big story chord about the transition from solitude to society, reflection to a reciprocated gaze, and first contact with the presence of another entity–however many or few–who are able to see what you see differently, and in doing so change it for you forever. 

misc. chatter about that

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One of the previous fan-translation teams that did old chapters of 7Seeds had translated an interview of Yumi Tamura and a reader’s questionnaire that were in the official fanbook of the series (it’s titled Edge of Emotions).

All the parts they did aren’t easy to find and not everyone heard of it so I thought of linking them here. It’s better to have read up to volume 21, before looking at it.

Tamura’s interview | Reader’s Questionnaire part 1 | Reader’s Questionnaire part 2

It looks like they didn’t translate everything (there’s a little “part 1″ on the title of the interview post but I could find no part 2). Nonetheless, there’s some really interesting stuff here. 

They also have a Fanwork Page (not updated anymore) and did a Fanwork Competition back in 2012.

one of my favorite aspects of tamura’s characterization is how skills and expertise interface with personalities, habits, and personal peccadilloes–in the case of the botanist girls, the same skillset acquires such particularity in both of their hands, and has taken them and the group such different places!  an interest in agriculture makes matsuri eager and helpful, knowing she’ll need group assistance to execute anything on her knowledge, but it makes ayu more withholding, exasperated that others expect her to literally read their basic surroundings for them. the acute sensitivity it amplifies for both is almost diametrically opposed: matsuri treats the environment a bit like a room to work, ayu treats it like a grand unknown to be paid homage. there’s a divergence in the role of love and rootedness (…ok) too, where at the end of the day, matsuri’s subsistence studies are deeply rooted in how she can provide for her team and loved ones, the return to familiarity and a visceral association with home, while ayu’s tenderness is for the plants themselves, and her foraging approach places the imposition on humans to subjugate themselves to the whims of an ecosystem that if respected, can yield its own, entirely new rewards. 

their shared but separate habits of observation and study and curiosity and synthesis make it very clear how they both developed and iterated their approaches, and the INTENSE pride they both take in their identities as botanists comes from things neither would be able to easily understand about the other! so when either of them get to shine, it’s not because someone needed botanical expertise, it’s because someone needed ayu or matsuri’s botanical expertise, specifically. 

you could never replace one with the other, because it’s not what they can do for the plot that’s important, it’s that uniquely personal alchemy of how their own hopes, goals, memories, and priorities act upon their skill and are in turn acted upon by it. matsuri’s enthusiastic, anecdotal tendency to explain builds morale and motivation for group projects like everything from the initial seed-sowing to the infamous SOYBEAN MIRACLE. the sentimental way she shares her knowledge helps her otherwise unprepared team get excited about cultivation and remember important details about agriculture too, emphasizing the resilience they share with plants! ayu couldn’t have done what she does despite knowing the same things, and she couldn’t have done what ayu does, taking an objectively bleak read of an ecosystem to diagnose a problem none of the civilians in her vicinity were able to see. when hana forages for fujiko and chisa, it’s ayu’s botanical knowledge (through summer a) she respects and uses, utterly devoid of nostalgia in a way that inspires her to take risks and even joy in how she looks at sustenance. during the mushrooms arc, it’s ayu’s skepticism of old-world plants, untainted by sentimentality, that helps the group stay cautious of sado, and it’s ayu’s clinical understanding of ecosystem patterns and the nonexceptionality of human lives that ultimately frees both her and aramaki from their survivors’ guilt. 

so often characters, and female characters in particular, are written as rpg party packages of decontextualized skills to slot into a particular challenge for optimal results for everyone–ayu and matsuri and the other talented members of this cast are always people who have skills, not skills grafted onto people. what they’ve been able to do is remarkable in part for being so grounded in who they are, and who they are is remarkable for being so grounded in what they can do. I LOVE THEM, I CAN’T WAIT FOR THEM TO MEET, have professional jstor battles over industrial earth denitrogenation and haircare, and have a reconciliation sleepover to share GMO horror stories in their sleeping bags 

compiling 7 Seeds chapter-specific content warnings for reccing, i thought they might be useful to others too–they’re under the cut and contain spoilers up to chapter 149. if there are any others you’d warn for, please let me know!

while writing these up, i realized i’ve never actually recced this properly despite it being an all-time favorite, so! 7 Seeds is an action/drama series about five groups of cryogenically frozen people who awaken in a postapocalyptic Japan with access to supply caches of “seeds,” from which point on they deal with survival challenges, inter- and intra-team conflicts, society establishment and governance, dysfunctional murderous schemes, unlikely alliances, farcical rescue escapades, etc.–what makes this one unique, i think, is that it both executes all the standbys perfectly AND understands why so many people hate them and improves upon the entire genre while doing it. 

it’s a lovely series to try if you love dystopias/apocalypses/survival adventures/dramatic romances and want to see one firing on all cylinders in spectacular fashion, and it’s also the right one if you hate them and want to see all their issues magnificently skewered and then rectified in a blaze of glory. 

details:

• josei series by Tamura Yumi, the author of Basara
  
• serialized 2001-present
  
• 161 chapters, 149 presently available in English
  
• winner of the Shogakukan Manga Award (2007), in company with series like Fullmetal Alchemist, Nana, and 20th Century Boys 

what i love about this series is that THE APOCALYPSE! is a bit of a red herring and Tamura’s central interest is more in the intricate psychology of any type of moving on: transitions, memory, entitlement, heritage, remembrance, the long game of people processing these things in context of a future they can’t have anymore, predicated on a past they loved–a goal, a relationship, an experience, a perception of themselves. in keeping with that, the surviving group is actually a believable cross-section of a futuristic society! and hence debates about class, gender, meritocracy, education, mental illness, etc. all continue to exist and influence the characters–socialized beings without a society. but it’s a middle finger to the idea that survival is about cynicism and violence, and is full of people supporting one another in unconventional ways, inventive acts of kindness and ingenuity– talent competitions! killer ping-pong games! use of a Final Fantasy theme as Morse code! an ocarina made out of a potato! performers, writers, dancers, entrepreneurs–all critical, all necessary.

Tamura doesn’t give up on action thrills and real danger and moral sophistication to create that sense of joy: she makes us thrill to things we’d normally see written as “boring.” it’s all the ridiculous, unglamorous stuff of life told in the idiom of the heroics of an action story and the high drama of a josei serial; the characters’ triumphs are celebrated for being so near to our own. 

the series features a true ensemble cast and unusual use of shifting point of view to let each character contribute notes to a story told in huge, sweeping narrative chords. it also allows one of the most diverse and developed female casts around to shine, and makes sure they all get their shot at substantial and exciting material!

there are the nominal heroines and backbones of their respective teams, the hikikomori negotiating her discomfort with ideas of “usefulness” in survival skills with feelings of worthlessness that drove her into seclusion in the first place, and the daredevil freeclimber outdoorswoman who worries about what she’ll be able to contribute after her team is stable and survival skills aren’t as critical. the cheery kogal “beautician-and-slash-and-burn-farmer!” who has Titanic fantasies in the middle of shipboard missions and happily safeguards her own and her teammates’ right to the sunniest teenage girlhood they can scrounge up! the acerbic botanist whose frustration with literally reading the environment for her less capable peers runs up devastatingly against the survivors’ guilt that tears her team of childhood friends apart, the former policewoman/only surviving team guide who wrestles crocodiles barehanded and cultivates a team with no survival experience into the most successful in the series, the courteous, ruthless former architect compartmentalizing spite and bitterness with whoever sent her to the future with an inability to resist providing for the team under her care, and the bored, amoral engineer she nudges into a fond and terrifying partnership by sheer breathtaking accident–and so many others.

it’s absolutely worth a try whatever your usual genre preferences are, just for its quality. although the art is generally a reservation for people, if you treat it like any sumptuous style and get past the first few chapters, it becomes clear that Tamura is an accomplished artist who knows exactly what she is and is not doing with that classic nineties shojo style, and it’s rewarding to read for how she does use it to exacerbate scale, vary focus, induce cognitive dissonance, and lend a sense of drama to things most writers would ignore! 

general content warnings to consider, with some specifically disturbing scenes by chapter if you’d like to skip ‘em:

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