Basara 21
Posted: March 13, 2009 Filed under: Basara 7 Comments »I had forgotten to mention this before, but I loved reading the essays in the backs of the volumes of this series. The books don’t have much in the way of footnotes, but we were treated to the pleasant and informative essays that helped explain any cultural mysteries that popped up. If I’m not mistaken, these were all written by Gerard Jones, who did the adaptation through volume 17. They are editor’s notes though, so the writer could also be Ian Robertson or P. Duffield. The editor for the series through those volumes, Patricia Duffield, wrote them. They are sorely missed once they stop appearing. Not that Basara is indecipherable without them, but they did add to my reading experience, at least.
I’m not sure if we got to see his face at the end of last volume, but I’m still impressed it took so long to unveil King Ukon. He’s actually sort of a lame villian, ruling more out of habit than with any vested interest in being a tyrant.
In this volume, Tatara and the Red King, now King of Japan, prepare to go to war with each other. I still have no idea what it is Shuri has in mind, but he manages to fire up everyone in Kyoto and get them all behind his war effort. He even gets most people to grudgingly hand over most or all of their wealth.
Also, I like that he is so happily taking a bath just before his war. As much as it confused me, the scenes where he was addressing the crowd in Kyoto were pretty amazing just because he really knows all the right things to say to get people to follow him. His kingly qualities show. But again… why the war after all this change he’s gone through? Will he really let a grudge against Tatara stand? But he says that she’s the only one he would ever consider marrying! Hmm. I flew through these volumes because I wanted to see the Sarasa/Shuri reunion SO BAD. They haven’t really been together since volume 15, but the reunion should be spectacular after all this time and character development.
Shima is still around, despite being soundly rejected by Shuri several times. I like that Shima is here, because it raises the possibility that perhaps the rift between Shuri and Sarasa is too big, which… you know, would be understandable given all the murdering and such. But her presence is puzzling since she isn’t really a threat to their relationship. Perhaps she just serves to show that Shuri still loves Sarasa… though what he wants to do with that love remains to be seen. Is love enough? Hmm.
The war starts off with some nice tricks traded between Shuri and Sarasa. Nothing heavy as of yet. Tatara kicks things off by basically telling Ginko off as a threat. I think she’s still a threat even without Tatara trusting her, but we’ll see.
And my mistake. Taro’s story wraps up in this volume with a message that both Shuri and Sarasa desperately need to get before they go too far into the attack. Apparently there is a bigger conspiracy afoot, though one wonders how it’s so big that it could unseat both a king and a resistance movement that’s captured the entirety of the country.
I was also quite pleased by Shuri’s elephants. What a fine thing to use in battle.
I love that it’s completely plausible that both of them are so dedicated to their respective causes that they could conceivably kill the love of their life to be true to the people who have followed them.
“If I’m not mistaken, these were all written by Gerard Jones”
Nope, they’re by Patricia Duffield. She also wrote little essays for Please Save My Earth, though I did not enjoy those as much as the Basara essays. She edited some X/1999. In addition to these, she wrote articles for Animerica/Animerica Extra back in the day, some of which are available on her website.
Okay. I’m not sure why I assumed they were by Gerard Jones, other than I thought that might have been part of the adaptation process. Did she do the feature articles in Animerica Extra, or the ones that spotlighted an untranslated series? I always looked forward to the latter. I ought to go back through the old issues and see how many of them wound up being translated. I know Happy Mania was one of the first ones I read, and I remember thinking specifically after I finished that one that it was a shame that none of the series would ever make it over to America, ever.
Yes. I’d been anticipating mortal combat between the two right up to the end. Now that I think about it, it’s more implausible that the two of them could develop such a strong bond in the short amount of time they had together. They both strike me as the type of people that totally would give anything and everything they had for their beliefs. Very strong characters.
She did both. You can see a list of her features here
http://www.mindspring.com/~theduffields/resume/articles/features.htm
and her reviews of then un-translated manga at
http://www.mindspring.com/~theduffields/resume/articles/in_depth.htm
Some of them she posted online, some of them she did not because of copyright issues.
Excellent. I remember a lot of those articles, now that I’m going through the list. I loved reading them. I was always a little disappointed that there weren’t more articles in the magazine, because those two were always so good. Actually, there was an article written by Jan Scott Frasier towards the end, but I didn’t enjoy those nearly as much (I think they were mostly about living and working in Japan). Bizarrely, I was under the impression that the editor of the magazine wrote the Featured articles, and that the editor was Gerard Jones (which also might not be true, I don’t have any issues here to confirm that, either). It’s weird that I would make that mistake twice.
I’m surprised how much has been licensed from that list of In Depth articles. I looked forward to that feature a great deal every month, and re-reading the ones she’s got archived is bringing back a lot of memories. I need to go back through the later ones too, I’d like to see what she said about Kaguya Hime.
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