thoughts on Saiyuki
Jun. 14th, 2007 02:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
edenfallingIt has now been over a month since I read vols. 1-9 of Kazuya Minekura's Saiyuki and vols. 1-7 of Saiyuki Reload. I'm not going to attempt a comprehensive review; I don't like doing that on unfinished series. Instead, here are some thoughts in no particular order. (Also some spoilers, but nothing too detailed.)
1. Limiters (especially Hakkai's limiters)
There seem to be a lot of theories about limiters floating around fandom. One popular one says that they're composed of solidified willpower or something like that, which would explain how Hakkai can get away with just dropping his itty-bitty ear cuffs on the ground every time he takes them off. This theory gains some support from the nature of Goku's limiter, which Kanzeon Bosatsu explicitly says is made of solidified heavenly power, but...
In vol. 4 of Saiyuki Reload, in the "Burial" arc, Banri equally explicitly says that "[Humans are] afraid of us, so they make limiters and shit to control us."
I'm inclined to think that Banri is correct in general and Goku's limiter is a special case, because Goku is already a special case for any number of reasons (especially because he isn't, technically speaking, a youkai). Therefore, Hakkai really is dropping his limiters on the ground and picking them up after fights.
Of course, we then run into four questions. 1) How does he find them again? 2) How did he pick them up after the fight with Seiten Taisei in vol. 7 of Saiyuki Reload when he was unconscious and had to be carried off by Gojyo? 3) Why does he do something so melodramatic and impractical, and do it repeatedly? 4) Where did he find them in the first place?
The obvious out-of-story answer to the first three is that it looks cooler this way and never mind the details. But for in-story answers... well, 2) I assume that Gojyo could easily pick up the limiters while Hakkai and Goku are beating the shit out of each other. 1) I assume that if limiters affect youryoku (youkai power), then they might well have some sort of 'resonance' effect that Hakkai, in particular, would find easy to detect. He is a chi manipulator, after all. And 3) Hakkai has issues. There are any number of psychological reasons for him to flick off his limiters instead of pulling them off calmly and slipping them into his pocket. Maybe he's renouncing his subsequent actions. Maybe he half-hopes he'll lose the bloody things and be unable to recover his human seeming. Maybe he doesn't want them on his person because the hypothetical resonance will dampen his strength even when he's not wearing them on his skin. I don't know; your guess is as good as mine.
As for question 4, oddly enough, I have yet to run across anyone using what I consider the obvious explanation. Follow me here: Gonou becomes a youkai and is in denial about this, since at this point in his life, he hates youkai. He wants to be human again. He's a well-educated man, so there's a definite chance that he knows a youkai limiter can at least make him appear human.
Now, where is he? In a youkai castle.
If Yaone, who lives in a youkai castle (and a castle whose inhabitants are presumably even more youkai-supremacist and human-hostile than Hyakugan Maoh's clan) can find a limiter on short notice, it seems logical to me that even separatist youkai may keep a stash of the things around. They can be awfully useful if you want to spy on humans or set ambushes, after all.
So why are people surprised that Gonou found some limiters and had figured out how to use them by the time he collapsed on the path to Gojyo's house? It's not as though anyone in Hyakugan Maoh's castle was going to protest if he raided their storerooms.
Your mileage may, of course, vary.
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2. Titles vs. Names
Sanzo is not actually Sanzo's name. It's his title. You can see this by watching how all the other Sanzo priests are referred to. When they're called Sanzo, it's usually by their disciples and it's usually in the context of 'Master Sanzo' or 'Priest So-and-so Sanzo.' They do, in fact, have names: Koumyou, Ukoku, Goudai... and Genjyo.
The thing is, Goku grabbed the 'Sanzo' part rather than the 'Genjyo' part of Sanzo's introduction, and I think Gojyo and Hakkai picked it up from him, though for them, using the title rather than the name may be a way (at least initially) of keeping some emotional and social distance -- polite distance in Hakkai's case, and mocking distance in Gojyo's, but distance nonetheless. I think Sanzo likes that distance. I think he may also consider it a fitting minor punishment to be called 'Sanzo' when he'd always associated that title with Koumyou, his father-figure.
The thing is, because Sanzo is always called Sanzo by the other four members of the ikkou, he essentially arrogates the title to himself; it becomes his name by default and leaves all the other Sanzos with only their given names. But I wonder what name he thinks of himself by: Genjyo or Kouryuu? I highly doubt it's Sanzo.
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3. Random Stuff
A) If the half-breed children of youkai and humans are marked by blood-red hair, why is it only scalp hair? (See vol. 2 where Goku reveals that Gojyo's pubic hair is black.) If some hair is red, shouldn't it all be red? Then again, most people do have dark brown to black body and pubic hair, regardless of their scalp hair color, so I guess it's not too unreasonable.
B) Hazel is gayer than a treeful of monkeys on nitrous oxide. (Okay, so I've just always wanted to use that phrase, but my ulterior motives do not in any way invalidate the truth of the statement!)
C) The only explanation for Yaone's fighting outfit is fanservice. It's too blatantly impractical and kinky to be anything else.
D) YMMV, but if Nii keeps his sutra in his bunny, then he's not necessarily attached to the bunny as such, right? Especially since he tears the bunny apart so casually when he needs the sutra again. He likes toys (Kami-sama's castle is pretty good evidence for that), and he is kinky (plenty of canon evidence there too), but presumably he doesn't like stuffed toys to the insane/kinky/sick degree I've seen in some stories. In any case, I think his interest in toys is less because he likes toys as such and more because he sees the entire world as a toy chest; he doesn't see other people as people, just as objects.
E) Here's a thought: Ken'yuu wanted someone to kill him, to overpower him despite his struggle to stay alive. If Nii still has that deep streak of self-destruction -- and the inability to passively accept defeat -- then I have to wonder whether he's been orchestrating Gyumaoh's revival, alienating Kougaiji, and antagonizing Sanzo (as well as throwing progressively nastier obstacles in the Sanzo-ikkou's path) in an effort to make sure that someone will finally be both strong enough and motivated enough to kill him. This may well be a subconscious motive, since Nii seems genuinely pissed off when Kougaiji breaks his brainwashing, but I think it's definitely something to consider.
F) Saiyuki and Journey to the West don't reconcile. And that's okay; one is inspired by the other, but you don't have to fit them into the same timeline. In fact, I think that's impossible, or people in the story would have remarked on the way the Sanzo-ikkou is a jazz riff on the original priest's journey to India. Since nobody in the story has made any such comments, it seems safe to assume that Journey to the West never happened or existed as a story in this world. And you know, given the literal existence of youkai, magic, and dragons that transform into jeeps, I think it should already be self-evident that the world of Saiyuki is not exactly ours. *grin*
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4. Pairings (and why I don't believe in them)
Minekura puts enough subtext in her story to... hell, I don't know; pick your metaphor. Curdle milk, maybe. Make a thousand slashers die of screaming orgasms. Whatever.
But I don't believe that, in canon, any of the characters are having sex with any other main character. (Except Gyokumen and Nii, but that's not subtext; that's text.) I would not be at all surprised to learn that Gojyo has some meaningless one-night stands along the trip, but I would be equally likely to believe that he just doesn't have the time or the energy after long days of travel and fighting.
What I do not believe is that Gojyo and Hakkai are having sex. Nor Hakkai and Sanzo, nor yet Gojyo and Sanzo, nor all three together. I especially don't believe that Goku is having sex with anyone; I don't think he even understands sex on a gut level, though Hakkai or Gojyo may have explained the basics to him at some point on general principles.
I think it's quite clear that Sanzo, Goku, Hakkai, and Gojyo are the most important people in each other's lives at this point, but not all intimacy is sexual. And also, while it's clear that, say, Gojyo and Hakkai have a very close bond (they lived together for three years; they gave each other new reasons to live; they anticipate each other without having to talk; etcetera), there are moments when they can miss amazingly obvious things about each other. The same goes for Sanzo and Goku, or Sanzo and Hakkai (which seem to be the other most popular pairings). Any subset of the group could function, but not as well as the full group; they need all four to balance each other out.
And before you start accusing me of proposing a foursome, let me repeat: not all intimacy is sexual. It is perfectly possible to have incredibly close, complicated, intimate, and rewarding relationships and never bring sex into the picture. In fact, I think that's more interesting, since it means you don't have the easy 'relationship + sex = better/deeper/more important relationship' clichés to reach for.
(Not that I think there's anything wrong with foursomes, of course. And if you write a good one, keeping all four guys IC, I am so there. I just happen to like gen a little more than smut.)
Also, while I don't think anyone is having sex in canon, I am perfectly willing to suspend my disbelief for the length of a story, provided the writing is good and the characters are in character. That's the beauty of fanfiction, after all. *grin*
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5. My Personal Reactions to the Ikkou
A) I like Hakkai best. He is exactly my kind of broken: intelligent, superficially calm, seething with jagged rage underneath, and somehow managing to balance genuine empathy and care for others with equally genuine disregard for anyone outside a very small circle of people who qualify as 'real' to him. (To clarify: he seems to like and care about people in general, but they never make it into his heart, and when push comes to shove, I think he'd sacrifice anyone but his few 'chosen people' without a second thought. He'd regret that afterward, but he'd do it. He's changed his name and is attempting to atone for his past, but the character traits that led him to mass murder are all still there inside, just consciously recognized and restrained a little more carefully now.)
I like that Hakkai simultaneously enjoys and abhors violence. I like that I can easily picture him leading a normal life as a model citizen, and equally easily picture him as a villain; he's already played variations on both roles in canon, after all. *grin* And I like his sense of humor; the touch of the macabre and the twist of disguised cruelty is beautiful.
B) Sanzo... I don't like him quite as much, but despite his multi-layered self-deception/self-protection/self-destruction, it's actually fairly easy to get an intuitive grasp of his personality. Just don't ask me to put it into words.
C) Goku is love. That is all.
D) It took me the longest to warm up to Gojyo. Perhaps it's that his tragic backstory didn't interest me as much as Hakkai's or Sanzo's, or perhaps it's that while I could see how and why he constructed his current persona, that persona didn't interest me much. I didn't dislike him; he just didn't click for me the way the other three did.
The moment that changed was at the start of the Kami-sama arc, after Kami-sama kills Kinkaku. Gojyo kneels by Kinkaku's body, and all we see is his back, and he says, "I want him to tell me what's so goddamn funny.... What would drive a sick son of a bitch like you to pick up two naïve boys and turn them into murderers?" The expression on his face when Kami-sama smiles and says, "It's a secret," the way he strikes without saying a word (and this is Gojyo; he always quips), and then the way he punches the ground after Kami-sama disappears in a cloud of beads and laughter...
Yeah. That's when I fell in love with Gojyo too.
ETA: E) Jeep/Hakuryuu is also love. (I can't believe I forgot to mention him at first. *is sheepish*) One random interesting thing about him is that he's a four-limbed animal rather than a six-limbed animal -- that is, he has wings instead of front legs rather than in addition to front legs. On the one hand, that's more realistic compared to real-life reptiles and birds, but on the other, it's a little weird compared to classic depictions of dragons.
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I may add to this if I think of other points.
1. Limiters (especially Hakkai's limiters)
There seem to be a lot of theories about limiters floating around fandom. One popular one says that they're composed of solidified willpower or something like that, which would explain how Hakkai can get away with just dropping his itty-bitty ear cuffs on the ground every time he takes them off. This theory gains some support from the nature of Goku's limiter, which Kanzeon Bosatsu explicitly says is made of solidified heavenly power, but...
In vol. 4 of Saiyuki Reload, in the "Burial" arc, Banri equally explicitly says that "[Humans are] afraid of us, so they make limiters and shit to control us."
I'm inclined to think that Banri is correct in general and Goku's limiter is a special case, because Goku is already a special case for any number of reasons (especially because he isn't, technically speaking, a youkai). Therefore, Hakkai really is dropping his limiters on the ground and picking them up after fights.
Of course, we then run into four questions. 1) How does he find them again? 2) How did he pick them up after the fight with Seiten Taisei in vol. 7 of Saiyuki Reload when he was unconscious and had to be carried off by Gojyo? 3) Why does he do something so melodramatic and impractical, and do it repeatedly? 4) Where did he find them in the first place?
The obvious out-of-story answer to the first three is that it looks cooler this way and never mind the details. But for in-story answers... well, 2) I assume that Gojyo could easily pick up the limiters while Hakkai and Goku are beating the shit out of each other. 1) I assume that if limiters affect youryoku (youkai power), then they might well have some sort of 'resonance' effect that Hakkai, in particular, would find easy to detect. He is a chi manipulator, after all. And 3) Hakkai has issues. There are any number of psychological reasons for him to flick off his limiters instead of pulling them off calmly and slipping them into his pocket. Maybe he's renouncing his subsequent actions. Maybe he half-hopes he'll lose the bloody things and be unable to recover his human seeming. Maybe he doesn't want them on his person because the hypothetical resonance will dampen his strength even when he's not wearing them on his skin. I don't know; your guess is as good as mine.
As for question 4, oddly enough, I have yet to run across anyone using what I consider the obvious explanation. Follow me here: Gonou becomes a youkai and is in denial about this, since at this point in his life, he hates youkai. He wants to be human again. He's a well-educated man, so there's a definite chance that he knows a youkai limiter can at least make him appear human.
Now, where is he? In a youkai castle.
If Yaone, who lives in a youkai castle (and a castle whose inhabitants are presumably even more youkai-supremacist and human-hostile than Hyakugan Maoh's clan) can find a limiter on short notice, it seems logical to me that even separatist youkai may keep a stash of the things around. They can be awfully useful if you want to spy on humans or set ambushes, after all.
So why are people surprised that Gonou found some limiters and had figured out how to use them by the time he collapsed on the path to Gojyo's house? It's not as though anyone in Hyakugan Maoh's castle was going to protest if he raided their storerooms.
Your mileage may, of course, vary.
---------------------------------------------
2. Titles vs. Names
Sanzo is not actually Sanzo's name. It's his title. You can see this by watching how all the other Sanzo priests are referred to. When they're called Sanzo, it's usually by their disciples and it's usually in the context of 'Master Sanzo' or 'Priest So-and-so Sanzo.' They do, in fact, have names: Koumyou, Ukoku, Goudai... and Genjyo.
The thing is, Goku grabbed the 'Sanzo' part rather than the 'Genjyo' part of Sanzo's introduction, and I think Gojyo and Hakkai picked it up from him, though for them, using the title rather than the name may be a way (at least initially) of keeping some emotional and social distance -- polite distance in Hakkai's case, and mocking distance in Gojyo's, but distance nonetheless. I think Sanzo likes that distance. I think he may also consider it a fitting minor punishment to be called 'Sanzo' when he'd always associated that title with Koumyou, his father-figure.
The thing is, because Sanzo is always called Sanzo by the other four members of the ikkou, he essentially arrogates the title to himself; it becomes his name by default and leaves all the other Sanzos with only their given names. But I wonder what name he thinks of himself by: Genjyo or Kouryuu? I highly doubt it's Sanzo.
---------------------------------------------
3. Random Stuff
A) If the half-breed children of youkai and humans are marked by blood-red hair, why is it only scalp hair? (See vol. 2 where Goku reveals that Gojyo's pubic hair is black.) If some hair is red, shouldn't it all be red? Then again, most people do have dark brown to black body and pubic hair, regardless of their scalp hair color, so I guess it's not too unreasonable.
B) Hazel is gayer than a treeful of monkeys on nitrous oxide. (Okay, so I've just always wanted to use that phrase, but my ulterior motives do not in any way invalidate the truth of the statement!)
C) The only explanation for Yaone's fighting outfit is fanservice. It's too blatantly impractical and kinky to be anything else.
D) YMMV, but if Nii keeps his sutra in his bunny, then he's not necessarily attached to the bunny as such, right? Especially since he tears the bunny apart so casually when he needs the sutra again. He likes toys (Kami-sama's castle is pretty good evidence for that), and he is kinky (plenty of canon evidence there too), but presumably he doesn't like stuffed toys to the insane/kinky/sick degree I've seen in some stories. In any case, I think his interest in toys is less because he likes toys as such and more because he sees the entire world as a toy chest; he doesn't see other people as people, just as objects.
E) Here's a thought: Ken'yuu wanted someone to kill him, to overpower him despite his struggle to stay alive. If Nii still has that deep streak of self-destruction -- and the inability to passively accept defeat -- then I have to wonder whether he's been orchestrating Gyumaoh's revival, alienating Kougaiji, and antagonizing Sanzo (as well as throwing progressively nastier obstacles in the Sanzo-ikkou's path) in an effort to make sure that someone will finally be both strong enough and motivated enough to kill him. This may well be a subconscious motive, since Nii seems genuinely pissed off when Kougaiji breaks his brainwashing, but I think it's definitely something to consider.
F) Saiyuki and Journey to the West don't reconcile. And that's okay; one is inspired by the other, but you don't have to fit them into the same timeline. In fact, I think that's impossible, or people in the story would have remarked on the way the Sanzo-ikkou is a jazz riff on the original priest's journey to India. Since nobody in the story has made any such comments, it seems safe to assume that Journey to the West never happened or existed as a story in this world. And you know, given the literal existence of youkai, magic, and dragons that transform into jeeps, I think it should already be self-evident that the world of Saiyuki is not exactly ours. *grin*
---------------------------------------------
4. Pairings (and why I don't believe in them)
Minekura puts enough subtext in her story to... hell, I don't know; pick your metaphor. Curdle milk, maybe. Make a thousand slashers die of screaming orgasms. Whatever.
But I don't believe that, in canon, any of the characters are having sex with any other main character. (Except Gyokumen and Nii, but that's not subtext; that's text.) I would not be at all surprised to learn that Gojyo has some meaningless one-night stands along the trip, but I would be equally likely to believe that he just doesn't have the time or the energy after long days of travel and fighting.
What I do not believe is that Gojyo and Hakkai are having sex. Nor Hakkai and Sanzo, nor yet Gojyo and Sanzo, nor all three together. I especially don't believe that Goku is having sex with anyone; I don't think he even understands sex on a gut level, though Hakkai or Gojyo may have explained the basics to him at some point on general principles.
I think it's quite clear that Sanzo, Goku, Hakkai, and Gojyo are the most important people in each other's lives at this point, but not all intimacy is sexual. And also, while it's clear that, say, Gojyo and Hakkai have a very close bond (they lived together for three years; they gave each other new reasons to live; they anticipate each other without having to talk; etcetera), there are moments when they can miss amazingly obvious things about each other. The same goes for Sanzo and Goku, or Sanzo and Hakkai (which seem to be the other most popular pairings). Any subset of the group could function, but not as well as the full group; they need all four to balance each other out.
And before you start accusing me of proposing a foursome, let me repeat: not all intimacy is sexual. It is perfectly possible to have incredibly close, complicated, intimate, and rewarding relationships and never bring sex into the picture. In fact, I think that's more interesting, since it means you don't have the easy 'relationship + sex = better/deeper/more important relationship' clichés to reach for.
(Not that I think there's anything wrong with foursomes, of course. And if you write a good one, keeping all four guys IC, I am so there. I just happen to like gen a little more than smut.)
Also, while I don't think anyone is having sex in canon, I am perfectly willing to suspend my disbelief for the length of a story, provided the writing is good and the characters are in character. That's the beauty of fanfiction, after all. *grin*
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5. My Personal Reactions to the Ikkou
A) I like Hakkai best. He is exactly my kind of broken: intelligent, superficially calm, seething with jagged rage underneath, and somehow managing to balance genuine empathy and care for others with equally genuine disregard for anyone outside a very small circle of people who qualify as 'real' to him. (To clarify: he seems to like and care about people in general, but they never make it into his heart, and when push comes to shove, I think he'd sacrifice anyone but his few 'chosen people' without a second thought. He'd regret that afterward, but he'd do it. He's changed his name and is attempting to atone for his past, but the character traits that led him to mass murder are all still there inside, just consciously recognized and restrained a little more carefully now.)
I like that Hakkai simultaneously enjoys and abhors violence. I like that I can easily picture him leading a normal life as a model citizen, and equally easily picture him as a villain; he's already played variations on both roles in canon, after all. *grin* And I like his sense of humor; the touch of the macabre and the twist of disguised cruelty is beautiful.
B) Sanzo... I don't like him quite as much, but despite his multi-layered self-deception/self-protection/self-destruction, it's actually fairly easy to get an intuitive grasp of his personality. Just don't ask me to put it into words.
C) Goku is love. That is all.
D) It took me the longest to warm up to Gojyo. Perhaps it's that his tragic backstory didn't interest me as much as Hakkai's or Sanzo's, or perhaps it's that while I could see how and why he constructed his current persona, that persona didn't interest me much. I didn't dislike him; he just didn't click for me the way the other three did.
The moment that changed was at the start of the Kami-sama arc, after Kami-sama kills Kinkaku. Gojyo kneels by Kinkaku's body, and all we see is his back, and he says, "I want him to tell me what's so goddamn funny.... What would drive a sick son of a bitch like you to pick up two naïve boys and turn them into murderers?" The expression on his face when Kami-sama smiles and says, "It's a secret," the way he strikes without saying a word (and this is Gojyo; he always quips), and then the way he punches the ground after Kami-sama disappears in a cloud of beads and laughter...
Yeah. That's when I fell in love with Gojyo too.
ETA: E) Jeep/Hakuryuu is also love. (I can't believe I forgot to mention him at first. *is sheepish*) One random interesting thing about him is that he's a four-limbed animal rather than a six-limbed animal -- that is, he has wings instead of front legs rather than in addition to front legs. On the one hand, that's more realistic compared to real-life reptiles and birds, but on the other, it's a little weird compared to classic depictions of dragons.
---------------------------------------------
I may add to this if I think of other points.
You are everything
Date: 2017-07-19 08:10 am (UTC)But that's not the reason I'm commenting. I know you made this post 10 years ago, but THANK YOU. I feel like I'm the only one who doesn't ship the characters. I see a very thorough, intimate, honest, and PLATONIC relationship between every pairing in the ikkou. Seriously, how can anyone think that Goku's having sex with anyone?! Or Sanzo, for that matter - he seems to be an asexual blob (wait... I mean that in the nicest possible way xD). And it makes the characters and their relationships so much more special if they're not all secretly doing it on the side - like the relationship between friends is sooo special, why mess that up?! I don't have a problem with people doing whatever pairings they want in fan fiction, but I just don't see it.
Anyway, I went out and made a dreamwidth account to make this comment, haha. And I assumed you'd never see it, but it looks like you made a post just yesterday, so maybe you will! I don't know anything about you (male? female? 12? 35?), but I just had to stop and thank you for your thoughtfulness. Have a nice day~
Re: You are everything
Date: 2017-07-19 05:50 pm (UTC)