Key Frames

One comment on “153 - Akane Bang-I-Shoot”

1. Hey there

   I really enjoyed your analysis on Journal with Witch. I think Duncan put it really poignantly when he said that Makio forgoes choice in favour of function. That, especially in your 20s, can be such a bitter process of realising the limits of your boundaries, of what you can reasonably carve your life out of and still preserve your own integrity. This process obviously varies for each person - and there is a number of ways this can be negotiated in a piece of fiction. Most often, I think it becomes part of a romanticised emancipation plot, where a heroic degree of willpower, self-improvement or social connection is necessary to for the character to lift themselves out of their predicament. It's almost liberal/neoliberal in nature, like the early modern fictions of pulling Fortuna by her hair and abusing her, this fiction that individuals can be whatever they please if they just really want it, and that conversely their predicaments are a result of their own lack of virtuous (in the truest sense of the etymology I guess, manly, heroic, in a Greek way) qualities.

   Reading Journal with Witch is really healing in that regard, because it presents to us such a mature and nuanced rendition of this predicament. Makio is positively ancient by anime/manga standards (as you have very amusingly pointed out), and that gives so much room to explore what a solved (or far-advanced) state of the choice/function tension can look like.

   I take so much solace in Makio having carved out a life for herself that works for her, it's so heart-warming that she can have a functioning social life with her writer friends and a romantic life with Shingo and now a shared domestic life in spite of the impossibly heavy burden that her divergence from the norm puts on her - that even someone like her could balance out her life and find a niche that she is comfortable in, that the humans around her love her for who she is, that even such a crass self-inflicted violation of her private space that Asa often is for her can work out and be negotiated into something beautiful. That brings me to tears.

   As for everything else: I am almost done reading the manga, and I haven't begun watching the anime yet, but I have watched and picked out some scenes of it. It's honestly strange how this super amorphous white-cube-esque stage on which the characters act in the manga was converted into real places with detail and colour. I think sometimes the anime undercuts a certain pace or disjointedness in the manga, where a quick back-and-forth between the characters is rendered in equally disjointed panels, which sometimes makes for a really mesmerising effect while reading.

   You also touched on the open question of how much of the author herself is in the characters of Journal with Witch, especially Makio. I think the question can't really be answered, anywhere in any story really, but I do feel the genuine experience and emotion in a lot of scenes that are almost certainly derived from the author's own lived experience or something close to it. There is such an intimate feel to scenes like Makio's dinner with Shingo, we are so close to her point of view, we see her emotions ebb and flow, and her view of him change and be negotiated in real-time. That felt real - that was cool, such a deep plunge into someone's mental space, such a sweet and honest piece of relationship-building (although again I felt like the anime didn't quite capture it in the same way the manga did).

   Again, thanks for putting your thoughts to the series. I always appreciate them.

   Nod

   Reply

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