Fannish Anomalies 2

By Jeanne

1) Japanese OOC

It is a truth pretty much universally acknowledged by now, that Japanese yaoi gets away with murder (character assassinaton in spades) and can get away with murder, because of the visual nature of most doujinshi. You don't have to prove that that's Hiiro standing there in his frilly dress with the crinolines and the lace. You look at him. It's Hiiro. Nor do you have to give the remotest hint of a reason as to why he's in a frilly lacy dress. He is because he is, and there he is. Fait accompli. Us text-yaoi gaijin can only look at the Japanese freedom and yearn.

Text needs reasons. Text needs rationale. Write "Trowa's great orbs welled with crystal tears and he sobbed aloud on Quatre's chest" and the automatic comeback will likely be "No he did not." As the famous line goes, you can call yourself a fire hydrant if you like but that doesn't make you one. And you can call your character Trowa if you like, but that doesn't make him Trowa.

So far so good. They got to murder their canon characters and we got IC and OOC as general terms of approval and dis-. Never underestimate the power of the medium.

Then came the Net.

Manga doujinshi don't do well on the net. The visual two-page layout is as basic to the doujinshi feel as the dialogue and the drawing, and something's missing when you don't have it. Consequently Japanese WPs have single illustrations and they have text stories. Lots and lots of text stories. And you know what?

The text stories are just as out of character as the manga doujinshi. The characters are doing just as off-the-wall stuff as manga doujinshi. Bitter enemies get married and go on honeymoons, off to see Character A's Dad to get his blessing. (Too bad that in canon Character A's spouse has already killed his father-in-law.) Guys have babies, guys have sex changes, dirty fighters become incapable of saying No or of planting a well placed foot where it would do the most good. From the Japanese pov, it would seem that the conviction of the visual has nothing to do with what's allowable in fanfic. They murder their characters because it's an acceptable thing to do to one's characters. No reasons needed, no rationale required. And us text-yaoi gaijin can only look at the Japanese freedom and yearn.

Because you know what else? They're still convincing, damn them. They sound like themselves. They *talk* the right way. Even if they're doing what they'd never do they still keep their Japanese verbal individuality- call themselves by the proper pronoun, use the proper level of politeness (or impoliteness, in most cases), end their sentences with the right particle, give the right nervous little laugh, adolescent whine ("DATttte--") or silent non-response ("-----------"), drop into Kansai-ben or highschool slang as needed, and let their sentences trail off without verbs as is their canon wont. On the face of it, Japanese fen have good ears. They get the guys down pat.

It's not that easy a thing to do, even when you're running off an English language show. Make a character have the proper slash emotions but still sound like the Captain of the Enterprise? Tough. But it's as nothing to the feat of making a Japanese character sound like himself in English. Those of us who get our manga and anime dialogue raw have characters in our heads who are talking Japanese, and the art of getting that into English is as much one of translation as it is creative writing.

I'm convinced that half of what reads to me as OOC or unconvincing dialogue in fics is just the result of the writer basing her understanding on a translation. Translated characters don't sound like themselves, and yes, that includes the ones in my own translations. They're moderate approximations at best and caricatures at worst. At least in a fanfic you can manipulate the dialogue so the guys never have to voice the most impossible Japanese-isms. I once wrote a story that revolved around a single Japanese word which, because it's untranslateable or at least untranslateable by me, was never overtly mentioned in the fic. *I* could see the unspoken word permeating all the action, but I bet no-one else did. And the impossibility of saying that word in either language really really irked me.

Which brings us to:

2) Hon'yakusha no Namida!! A translator's tears

The hair-puller-outers. Words that won't go. Because the thing in English just isn't the thing in Japanese, or because the Japanese thing is wrapped around with social meanings we don't have, or because the languages just *work* different.

Most Japanese turns very nicely into Victorian English. That's because the Victorians, like the Japanese, had a fondness for nouns even in their conversation. Modern colloquial English prefers phrases. Japanese has the all-purpose 'aite' but we have 'the person you do something with'. The person I'm talking to, /not/ 'my interlocutor', the guy I'm fighting, /not/ 'my opponent.' Translate Japanese nouns as nouns and you get an amazingly stuffy bunch of teenaged boys. They have 'classmates' and 'fellow club members', not guys in my class and guys in the judo club. Or worse, they go quaint. They call each other 'coward!' and 'mannerless ruffian!' and 'misbegotten abortion!' and say 'That's rude!' to each other.

We've adopted a lot of thing-words, so we don't have to talk about 'quilts' instead of futons like the early translators. Ganbaru and gaman are finally winning acceptance, and not a moment too soon. The lack of a single-word colloquialism for kyoudai meaning 'brothers and sisters' is something we live with. (Japanese translating from English have to do the judgment call on whether a sister is older or younger, after all.) But my all-time weeping word is-- yurusu. Let's just accept that the Japanese say 'yurushite kure' and not make me translate that as 'forgive me.' Big rough guys don't say 'forgive me' in English. I think its proper equivalent is an anguished (as opposed to a casual) 'sorry', but that's still not the same as hearing a guy say 'yurushite.'

A few more:

Ayashii- odd, suspicious. 'There was a suspicious character loitering outside the classroom today' isn't right to my ear, not from a kid. Someone kinda weird, I didn't like the look of him, something funny about him- that's more like it. But ayashii is good standard Japanese and 'something funny' is colloquial English. I see a disparity. Standard English sounds wrong for the English version of this teenaged character, but colloquial English sounds wrong for the Japanese original.

Kuyashii. Oh god. Kuyashii is really hard to get a handle on. You know the feeling but there isn't a word for it. It seems to be pretty much the Victorian 'mortified' and 'vexed' but with a bit more anger and despair thrown in. The emotion that makes you want to cry because I'm so *stupid* and everything's so damned *unfair* and... Japanese men are kuyashii, but our guys I suppose are somewhere between really pissed off and-- really pissed off. Only teenaged girls can be so embarrassed they just wanna die.

Shikkari shite! Famously translated as 'pull yourself together' in the old Mito Komon TV eps, this one is still a problem, because half the time you say it in frantic concern to people with bullet holes in their chests, as you grab hold of their shoulders and shake them violently. I guess 'Hang on!' comes closest, but it's not always usable. If translation is the art of substituting what one would say in English for what the character did say in Japanese, then the real equivalent is Are you all right!? Just as I once joked that the proper translation for O-agari kudasai (please come up), the thing you always say when asking a guest into the house, is 'The place is a mess.' Well, it's what we *always* say...

All the 'politeness' words (ie words referring to politeness, not politeness language itself) because over here politeness or its lack isn't something that bothers anyone but grandmothers. In Japan seemingly it bothers everyone. You can cow a group of ten year old boys by huffing 'shitsurei!' (rude) at them, and I've seen it done. Try that in any NAmerican city and see what happens.

All the 'clean' and 'dirty' words. Because they're talking about people's characters, not their bodies. Yogoreta, yogore no nai- defiled, unsullied, pure and impure. Even worse, the 'clear' words. "He looked at me with his pure eyes and smiled at me from his clear face." You see why I said Japanese makes for good Victorian English?

3) The Male Mary Sue

For lack of anything better to call him. This is something I've been uncomfortably aware of most of my manga-reading life, but I'd never gotten a clear fix on it until I read Wild Adapter. (See review.) Now I like WA, very much, but---

Manga is full of animus figures- the dark and dangerous male, so irresistible to women from at least the days of Lord Byron and don Juan. He's especially irresistible to girls and very young women, is one reason I think you see a lot of him in shoujo manga. (A little older and women god help them start actually dating and bedding animus figures, and then it's all over for us.) You can do a list of adjectives that apply to him- cool, sardonic, icy, unfeeling, ironic, superior, aristocratic etc etc. He always has a wry sense of humor. He often has a pretty wit. In Japan a lot of the time he's the one who *doesn't* act, as opposed to the genki hero who does. He just stands back and makes ironic comments. He's usually a loner. He has a tragic past (tm). He's gorgeous, of course. Yeah, you know the one I'm talking about.

And animus figures are perfectly legit for mangaka and fanwriters to put in their stories. If everyone else is half-way to being an archetype, your gorgeous guys should be too. It's just that every so often I have a funny feeling that I'm looking not so much at the guy the writer finds hot, as at the guy the writer wants to be.

The MS tipoffs are all there. He's *too* perfect. He gives all the bad guys, and the bad mannered guys, their comeuppance. The good guys watch him from a distance in awe. (He's Magnificently Lonely, is why they don't get closer.) Women, children and animals love him. If it's yaoish, other men love him too- in a decent manly fashion of course. He's nice to innocent children and animals, but treats the dirty adults as they deserve, which demonstrates how pure he is. With the usual animus figure/ poor sweet baybee, learning of the traumatic past makes you say 'Ah now I see why he does such shitty things.' With the MS it makes you say 'Ah, now I see why he's so magnificently isolated and proudly lonely.'

Well, Wild Adapter goes one better. We get a character, not of immense interest in himself- small-fry hoodlum who gets to be no.2 to Kubota's no.1. And small-fry hoodlum spends an awful lot of time looking at Kubota and commenting on his complex and unknowable marvellousness. When no-one's around to remark on what Kubota does, all you see is impenetrable Kubota acting efficiently, impenetrably and (in general) lethally. Then we're back to the third-person view of Kubota, yet another person charmed and fascinated by Kubota's charm and fascination. We do get two pages of Kubota himself, but that's it.

I'll give Minekura the benefit of the doubt and say she's probably trying a very difficult trick- presenting someone who reads charismatic and fascinating from the outside, but who doesn't himself register any of this inside. Kubota can't narrate his own story because Kubota is being very enryo-ish (stand back reserved) about his own existence. But I do wish her characters would talk just a little less about the wonderful contradictions of Kubota and just let us look at him being wonderfully contradictory: affable and likable and emotionally not-there and sexy as hell.