Equally striking is their fierce loyalty to one another each girl is willing to sacrifice herself so that her friends might live to complete their mission. Fuu, Umi, and Hikaru prove just as adept at repelling surprise attacks and killing monsters as their shonen manga counterparts though all three girls experience pangs of self-doubt, they show the same steely resolve in combat that Naruto, Ichigo, and InuYasha do. What sets Rayearth apart from so many other shojo fantasies, however, are the lengthy battle scenes.
(He makes a brief but memorable cameo early in the story, as the girls struggle to escape The Forest of Silence.) The girls’ fights, too, are tempered by shojo sentiment “heart” and compassion play as important a role in defeating many of their enemies as strength and speed. The girls bicker and complain about school they chibify whenever they’re flustered or frustrated they cluck and fuss over cute animals and they share a collective swoon over the series’ one and only cute boy. On a moment-to-moment basis, Rayearth reads like shojo. As the girls advance towards their goal of becoming Magic Knights, however, they begin to realize that Clef Guru, their guide and protector, has misrepresented the true nature of their assignment. In order to rescue Emeraude, Fuu, Umi, and Hikaru must endure a series of trials that will reveal whether the girls are equal to the task. If you missed Rayearth when it was first released by Tokyopop, the story goes something like this: three schoolgirls are summoned to defend the kingdom of Cefiro from the wicked priest Zagato, who’s imprisoned Cefiro’s regent, Princess Emeraude, in a watery dungeon. A closer examination reveals that Rayearth is, in fact, a complex, unique fusion of shojo and shonen storytelling practices. Shonen manga in drag - that’s my quick-and-dirty assessment of CLAMP’s Magic Knight Rayearth, a fantasy-adventure that adheres so closely to the friendship-effort-victory template that it’s easy to forget it ran in the pages of Nakayoshi.
0 kommentar(er)
