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eyedelater · 2 years

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this is the post i have written while reading pluto by urasawa naoki

what a good recommendation. thank you for sharing.

i am very tickled by the fact that this is a spinoff of astro boy, i'm reading it without ever having consumed ANY astro boy media, AND astro boy himself dies in it (for a time.) every one of these factors is *chef's kiss*. i love the idea that someone will put their whole heart into creating a spinoff like this and not hold back whatsoever.

i will note that everyone having a large nose makes it a little difficult to distinguish characters sometimes. like haas and gesicht. but it's also refreshing to have a manga artist who does not hold back when drawing noses. and i'll admit the noses are powerful.

i'm reading a scanlation by stephen paul and mangascreener and i think they've done a great job (insofar as i can say that without having seen the raws). i mean there's no foolish grammatical errors or anything. well, very few. i have no sense of how long ago this translation occurred. might've been when the manga was coming out.

the themes around AI and emotion and humanity are compelling… i'm just absorbing everything without forming thoughts of my own.

i notice robots are hetero. i'm sure there's nothing stopping them from falling in love in non-hetero ways though. and they can raise human children…? i want to see a family with three robot moms and one human kid. the luckiest kid in the world with her amazing strong three robot moms.

the idea of making strong robot cops and soldiers that look like normal middle-aged white men. and not even really sexy ones. maybe if they were too sexy it would be distracting?

the idea of a world with sentient AI robots who can be easily destroyed and are irreplaceable. the mind itself can't be backed up and stored somewhere? you have to just accept that it can't. [note added after reading the whole thing: they address the idea that a mind can be copied and put into a new robot body and that it then becomes a new being. this must be the school of philosophy the author adheres to with respect to duplication of minds)

when pluto stopped possessing the park guy's body and the other guy was like "now come to your only TRUE body…" and pluto emerged up from something wet. robot bodies are usually the opposite of wet. that's how you make a killer robot extra scary. have its body be wet.

tenma is just gendo ikari with a pompadour… right down to the glasses shape. says his son hates him. wife's dead

of course you will think an AI is a failure if you're creating it to try to replicate a certain person…

all these anti-robot microaggressions oh my god

pluto's true form is revealed with no explanation as to why it had to be wet earlier

it switched to a different scanlation group and the quality immediately went down haha… and some chapters later, this new group translated it as "gejihit" instead of "gesicht." they misunderstood the (ostensible) protagonist's name. the guy whose face is on the cover. they didn't bother to learn that guy's name before taking on the translation project.

i wonder if gesicht was so named not because of the significance of the german word Gesicht (which just means "face") but because of how it sounds transliterated in japanese, as gejihito, where "hito" means "person" and "geji" could mean "command/order" (as in taking commands or orders). also "gejigeji" means "house centipede" (irrelevant)

i guess atom did have to come back to life… since he's astro boy…

been a while since i took any manga screenshots to comment on but i had to for this one: https://gyazo.com/edf86995592bc2a56bfec0f94ad9ddf8 i want a math person to tell me how many words it would take to express that formula verbally. this is a human guy saying a big stupid formula out loud to a robot. if the recipient is a robot, you can give him a microsd card or have him visually scan a piece of paper. formulas like those are hell to say out loud, right? dumbass tenma. this is my unhelpful commentary.

you could hold some of these people's noses in the palm of your hand like a small apple.

lately i've been paying extra attention to how facial expressions in manga portray emotions. the range of facial expressions shown on characters tends to be kind of set within one manga (you rarely see an established mangaka bust out an expression the likes of which you've never seen in their work), but each mangaka has a distinct way to do it. it's their take on the breadth of human emotions. the faces in ranking of kings are very unique and full of heart and also often endearingly clumsy and also sometimes confusing and vague. but they work! the faces in pluto are in a completely different style and also seem to encompass different emotions, but they also work and are clearly full of heart. there is POWER in well-executed facial expressions. it is narrative power and emotional power. it's COMMUNICATION. and one manga where the facial expressions do not communicate well with me is stupid jujutsu kaisen where if someone is in a tense moment they just make a face like 8| and it's like, that face doesn't mean anything. that face isn't showing anything. and that's one reason i have mercilessly declared that jujutsu kaisen is lacking in heart. jujutsu kaisen never made me fuckin cry! (maybe it did. i forget.) it's got nothing but Coolness. you can't build a whole good manga solely on Coolness. it's not a matter of genre or technical artistic skill. this has been the obligatory shitting on jujutsu kaisen of this post.

they really gave pluto a cute design. i'm very satisfied. he's got teeth, and i like that. still no word on why he is or was wet. he opened his mouth and it made saliva strings. machine oil? or still wet?

astro boy gets powered up by the power of hate…

when you don't read manga for a while, you lose track of the approximate scale of how many mangas there are and what proportion of them might be very good. i'm very pleased to find there is a manga this good that i had never heard of. (except maybe once. i do have a vague memory of seeing a tumblr post about naoki urasawa's noses.)

it is very like a president of the united states of ******* to become willingly ensnared in the machinations of an entity that clearly only ever had bad intentions

bora appears and it yells HOGAAAH and BORAAA

i had true doubt as to whether the world would end, right up until the middle of the last chapter. i can appreciate that. i also couldn't have predicted that final panel. but i appreciate that unpredictability too.

i hate the adjective "gritty." maybe because in my mind the connotation is of a "gritty reboot" that takes something good and turns it into something stupid by trying to make it edgy and morally dubious. like… have you read the unreleased early draft movie script for louis sachar's Holes? forced edginess to the point where it's ridiculous and it doesn't Hit. "gritty" is like imagine dragons (diss). i don't want to describe this manga as "gritty" because i don't want to insult this manga. it doesn't have any of the surface-level manufactured darkness of something "gritty." it has proper darkness and proper philosophical and moral quandaries. and it has beauty.

how do i decide which mangas to write posts about as i read vs which to let simmer without putting my thoughts into words? i dunno.

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