apprentices & comparisons
15 Aug 2010 11:15 pmWe can blame this entire post on ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ivoryandhorn.
First: apprentices. It's a long tradition (West and East) of apprentices going through the chop wood, carry water period before ever being allowed to touch any tools of the trade. In the West, the real learning doesn't seem to start until one becomes a journeyman, having graduated out of the simplest practices and general grunt-work of the apprentice. A long way to say: I'm willing to accept that apprentices do grunt-work and are often just barely a step above slaves -- what gets me is when stories treat such extreme apprentice-abuse as funny.
This has been bugging me about D.Gray-man, which to be honest I'm only watching because there's little else right now that has my attention, and watching means moving away from the computer. In other words, it's a mental break, although I don't particularly care for the fact that I'm taking quite that much of a mental break. (I mean, honestly, is the entire first season nothing but freaking filler? I don't think I would've made it past about the fourth episode if I hadn't read the manga and knew it'd be getting better... well, sort of.)
Anyway, the manga implies a lot about Allen's time as an apprentice, while the anime goes into considerably more detail and flashback. Both treat Allen's experiences as a kind of joke, though Allen himself (at least in the manga) seems to withhold purposefully any further details, preferring to let any discussion pass with a hand-wave/smile rather than go into detail (where, it implies, he might not find it so easy to pretend like it was nothing). The anime-version, however, treats the entire thing as funny, in the narrative, I mean: other characters both reinforce the "it's so funny" as well as outright undermine Allen's own obvious reluctance for the telling and dislike of what he's telling. I might even be amused by the irony of a female character basically telling the male character right up that the male character's impression/understanding is wrong (because normally it's the other way around: male --> female )... if I weren't so annoyed by the narrative treating outright abuse as somehow a source of amusement, even of admiration!
( ...and a little more on that first thing, and then the second thing: hard choices, wherein yet again Arakawa shows me the way. )
Other thoughts as they come, again, with all blame due (for once, not on Duo) to I&H.
ivoryandhorn. First: apprentices. It's a long tradition (West and East) of apprentices going through the chop wood, carry water period before ever being allowed to touch any tools of the trade. In the West, the real learning doesn't seem to start until one becomes a journeyman, having graduated out of the simplest practices and general grunt-work of the apprentice. A long way to say: I'm willing to accept that apprentices do grunt-work and are often just barely a step above slaves -- what gets me is when stories treat such extreme apprentice-abuse as funny.
This has been bugging me about D.Gray-man, which to be honest I'm only watching because there's little else right now that has my attention, and watching means moving away from the computer. In other words, it's a mental break, although I don't particularly care for the fact that I'm taking quite that much of a mental break. (I mean, honestly, is the entire first season nothing but freaking filler? I don't think I would've made it past about the fourth episode if I hadn't read the manga and knew it'd be getting better... well, sort of.)
Anyway, the manga implies a lot about Allen's time as an apprentice, while the anime goes into considerably more detail and flashback. Both treat Allen's experiences as a kind of joke, though Allen himself (at least in the manga) seems to withhold purposefully any further details, preferring to let any discussion pass with a hand-wave/smile rather than go into detail (where, it implies, he might not find it so easy to pretend like it was nothing). The anime-version, however, treats the entire thing as funny, in the narrative, I mean: other characters both reinforce the "it's so funny" as well as outright undermine Allen's own obvious reluctance for the telling and dislike of what he's telling. I might even be amused by the irony of a female character basically telling the male character right up that the male character's impression/understanding is wrong (because normally it's the other way around: male --> female )... if I weren't so annoyed by the narrative treating outright abuse as somehow a source of amusement, even of admiration!
( ...and a little more on that first thing, and then the second thing: hard choices, wherein yet again Arakawa shows me the way. )
Other thoughts as they come, again, with all blame due (for once, not on Duo) to I&H.