by Jeanne

(Note that there are spoilers througout this for vols 1-14 of the manga)

Shuri the dweeb has a half-brother. He has several, actually, and dislikes them all: the Black King up in the north; the Blue King in the west around what was once Tokyo; the Blue King's older brother who was an enlightened prince of a reforming nature, which got him into an unfortunate hunting 'accident' on the High King's orders. Remember this dead prince; he's important.

Visiting the Tokyo area in vol 4 and 5 (in disguise, but natch), Shuri and Sarasa run into the Blue King, a card-carrying pervert who likes to watch people die- preferably slowly and in agony, poisoned by one of his pets tarantulas or eaten by one of his pet crocodiles. He's known as the Snake King, for good reason. His people have taken to hanging themselves rather than live under his cruelties. He relies heavily on the head of his guards, the ash-haired, delicate and (clearly) debauched Asagi. Given the way the Snake King is all over Ageha when he shows up ('My sweet Ageha, won't you be mine at last? I do so love beautiful men') one has to speculate that Asagi's duties include those of a yaoi nature. (Ageha brushes the king off, 'But *you* aren't beautiful' and the SK is ready to feed him to the crocodiles. But Asagi smooths him down, 'His poisonous tongue is one of his charms: and you know how you love poisonous things.') Asagi either has the hots for Ageha himself or has adopted the court fashion of being an Ageha fan, because he too does a fair amount of sweet clinging to Ageha in the early part of the story.

Sarasa manages in short order to foment a rebellion among the Snake King's people, though it's Shuri, appalled at his brother's idiocy more than his inhumanity, who hangs him over his own crocodile pit and leaves him to fate. Fate shows up in the form of Asagi, who informs the SK that he's not really the king: he's a slave child foisted on the world so the real Blue King could grow up safely, and avoid the fate of his older brother. The real Blue King, naturally, is Asagi, who thanks his substitute politely for his long service, cuts the rope, and sends him off to the crocodiles.

As may be seen, Asagi is a born schemer. 'I won't be toyed with and I won't be manipulated,' he declares at one point, before proceeding to toy with and manipulate everyone in sight. Asagi evidently believes in the adage 'Screw them before they can screw you.' His main goal in life is to bring down Shuri. This seems such a reasonable thing to want to do that one doesn't wonder until much later just how Asagi came to know and hate the Red King. Shuri says himself that he'd never met his brother the Blue King (SK) before, so why should he and the BK's chief guard be acquainted?

In order to topple Shuri (and rub his face in the mud) Asagi contrives to join Tatara's army. He does this by faking his execution as a traitor. He has himself burned on a cross, and is in fact fairly singed by the time Tatara and her troops come to rescue him. His men are relieved- they didn't know whether to take him down before he died or not- but the next minute they're assassinated by one of the four pretty-face retainers (half-ninja, half-secret agent) who work for Asagi. Two of these ninja are single- handedly responsible for a large decrease in the Basara population. Asagi doesn't have much more respect for human life than the Snake King did or Shuri does. Must be an occupational hazard of roylaty.

Vile as he is, it's hard not to like Asagi. He has a lot of energy, which is always a plus, and it's more directed than Shuri's smash and bash approach or Tatara's play it as it lays. (Remember, this girl never intended to be a rebel leader: she keeps waiting for it all to be over and life to return to normal.) True, Asagi is a force of chaos, intent only on destruction, but in the early part of the work he acts as the satisfying nemesis that gives Shuri's arrogance just what it deserves. Another point: Asagi is the most intelligent person in the strip except for Ageha. He has the brains to know, for instance, that he can tell Ageha exactly how he's planning to use Tatara and be certain that Ageha, with his combination of passivity and irony, will simply sit back and watch how Tatara deals with the threat. (Asagi's game plan, btw, is to use Tatara's rebellion to bring down both his brothers, then get rid of Tatara herself. 'That'll make this country a lot cleaner,' he remarks, a nice little throw away line in volume 5 that has ramifications for the end of the series.)

It's also nice to have a charming villain you love to hate, especially when the only other candidates for the role are the charmless and early-disappearing Shido and the charmless but determinedly still-around Shuri. You know Shuri will come out on top eventually because he's ho-hum the romantic hero ie the guy the heroine has the hots for. There are no such guarantees for Asagi, whose health is bad, who has a doctor saying he'll die before he's twenty, and who seems bent on doing as much damage as he can before that happens, which invites retribution. Someone will surely rub Asagi's face in the dirt for him, you think, as soon as they twig to what he's doing.

Through a combination of blackmail and murder he deprives Shuri of his two closest counsellors, foments a rebellion among his people, and forces Shuri to flee to Okinawa. The high king's army marches in to take control of his territory and Shuri is without a kingdom. The evidence suggests that Asagi did the same kind of undermining with the SK: who was never very bright, we're told, but who wasn't the complete monster he became until Asagi appeared at his court.

Asagi has access to privileged information- those ninja retainers of his get around- and he figures out, long before anyone else, that Tatara is Sarasa is the girl Shuri is in love with. He's thus able, several times, to prevent Sarasa from realizing who Shuri is, postponing her enlightenment until the worst possible moment- basically, when her forces are fighting his with the high king's army coming in to crush them both. Of course knowing who Sarasa is makes it necessary for Asagi to try to get Sarasa for himself. She's Shuri's, so Asagi has to have her. It looks a lot like a FY 'everyone must be in love with the heroine' plot, but the Asagi/ Sarasa relationship isn't half-bad, actually. (It's also absolutely crucial to the story.) Asagi despises Tatara's idealism and willingness to trust people, but he's also unwillingly drawn by the fact that she'll trust even him.

It's a nice study in ambivalence. Asagi wants to believe the world is as despicable as he knows it is, and he hates anything that suggests it might not be. But part of him half wants to believe that Tatara's vision might be possible, even while he hopes it's not. This is, after all, a Japanese manga where, as Panthea said apropos of Yuuyuu Hakusho, 'nobody is irredeemable and these people would die for their cats.' Asagi won't die for anyone's stupid cat, but in the end he proves as human as anyone else. Even in the early volumes there's something a little off-kilter, a little not-quite-right, about Asagi as stock badnasty. He's more than just the classic 'charmingly evil villain who's more interesting than the hero.' (In fact, there are times he comes across as an irritating little git who doesn't even register that no-one's taken in by him.) It's this oddity that Ageha picks up on when he wonders just what it is that makes Asagi run.

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