My Goodreads Review of The Promised Neverland, Volume 20 (and the series as a whole).

 My farewell to this series. There is always a sense of reward and sorrow when a good series you read or watch come to an end and you are done with it. That is me now with The Promise Neverland. My love of manga is partly because of the franchise so I feel I owe a debt to it. So here are my thoughts:

The Promised Neverland, Vol. 20 by Kaiu Shirai
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Around now, seven years ago...
I was drawing the prototype storyboards of The Promised Neverland that I would later submit to the Shōnen Jump editorial department. I was confident about my idea. But there were many elements of the story that didn't have the standard "Jump" traits. It had a female protagonist, and it was plot driven instead of character driven.
Even as I look back on it now, I strongly believe that depending on the editor, my submission could have been rejected on the spot." - Kaiu Shirai, October 2, 2020

Aquí se Puede

[I will get to the actual volume in this review, but this is the meta-portion:]

The Promised Neverland, along with One-Punch Man & Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, got me to read manga after spending so long avoiding the format despite being an anime fan for most of my life. Now manga makes-up the near-majority of the sequential-art that I read. That was not true in April 2019 when I decided (very correctly in hindsight) not to wait for a second season of the anime and read the manga from where the first season ended. This story was a very interesting look into the dystopian/horror genre in anime/manga. It was also a very interesting look into two things that I tend to note on in anime/manga/light-novels: the depictions of Black people in the format and the use of involuntary servitude (e. g. slavery, serfdom, etc.). The use of those elements in the plot were different and predictable in this story.

To quickly address the former: Despite the standard-line of manga abiding by the artistic concept of Mukokuseki (無国籍), which is to say of no one ethnic o national origin, it has always been clear that in-practice this just meant making characters look generic and white (interestingly, you don't see a lot of characters drawn with "Asian" features unless they are from China or Southeast Asia). When Black characters did appear in the early days of anime & manga, it was usually in the blackface minstrelsy style. This only started changing in the 1980s—and it was a slow change. Nowadays, it is expected of Japanese illustrators to draw more realistic depictions of Black/dark-skin characters—but every so often there are relapses. While I think that the artist Posuka Demizu did a good job at drawing most of the Black characters in this book (this was a very ethnically diverse non-mecha series), I still can't get my head over why she retreated back to the old stereotypes for Sister Crone. The character was dead before I started reviewing the manga, but I was planning to lodge my complaint on that when I reviewed the series in-full.

I have to say I was more fascinated in how it depicted slavery. Technically, it does not really depict slavery as the kids are technically raised as livestock on farms rather than chattel on slave plantations, but the way that places like Grace Field were organized in the story were plantation-adjacent (especially when we learn what their true purpose was). I think The Promised Neverland, along with Shadows House (can't wait to review this book on Goodreads one day. Another dystopian/horror series that uses serfdom instead of slavery), are some of the better analogues to involuntary servitude as oppose to most depictions you see from series originating from light-novels (a Japanese media format with much less quality control) that tend to depict slavery through the lens of male power-fantasy. I think the display of how othered and de-humanized the humans in the demon world were was especially well-done.

[Ok, now on to the actual volume]

With all that said, the finale was less about a final battle, but with the final reckoning of the price of freedom for the stories heroine. While most of the resolutions for the characters are satisfactory (unless you're Isabella), Emma's luck of getting out of all obstacles in the story unscathed ends here, and she is forced to give-up something substantial (view spoiler)[her memories (hide spoiler)] to the deity that controlled the over-arching events of the story in order to obtain the passage of the humans from the demon world to Earth (which in the current day of this volume is uncomfortably looking like where our current world is headed). Despite this price, Emma agrees that the bigger goal of liberation is the most important. The last line from that other comic—The Complete Persepolis—rings true here ("Freedom had a price"). I may have wished for something happier and not bittersweet, but the ending we have here is solid.

I think that The Promised Neverland will always have a mixed reception because of the second season of the anime. If you only watched it through the anime, than you view it along with the Matrix sequels as the sequel tainting the whole franchise or season 2 of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya as one of the great disappointments of anime. But if you only read the manga, or like most people, watched season 1 then read the manga it is one of the greatest series of the 2010s. The "Goldy Pond arc" of volumes 7-11 was the highlight of the series to me (and why I was so disgusted with season 2 of the anime totally cutting it out). While I do think I have read better manga since I began this series (that I have not yet covered on Goodreads), this is the second series where I covered most of it on Goodreads after Demon Slayer which I finished last year and one of the best manga I have covered so far.


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 The Blog looks a little weird right now, that is because of a glitch not letting the sidebar be, well, on the side. So this will have to be the set-up for the time being.

My Review of Kimi ni Todoke - Season 3

[I originally posted this back in August to another site that I was using to track my anime & manga, but it got weird as it turns out the moderators there were out of control with their power so I am reposting this here. Maybe later on I will share my interesting experiment/experience this year of trying to interact with the online anime community after 10 years of not doing that.]

Few anime go as long between seasons as this one. In the time between season 2 and season 3, the landscape of anime romances has changed a lot—partly due to the influences of this series. The manga came to an end and a lot of the tropes utilized in this series would show-up in other series. I think the big impact is the way male-targeted romance series got better over time due to the legacy of this show. Shounen & seinen romances like Insomniacs After School, Call of the Night, and possibly the most interesting example for me—The Dangers in My Heart are just some of the series that owe at least a partial debt to this series. And we haven't even talked about other shoujo romance series. As much as I could talk about the legacy of Kimi ni Todoke, lets get to season 3 itself. 

While the hard work of becoming a couple was resolved in season 2, this season was Shouta and Sawako trying to discover what that means. While they come to terms with that by the end of the season, you could argue that the real focus was the deepening ties and relationship re-evaluation between Chizuru and Ryuu. We already knew about Ryuu's feelings, but now Chizuru was made to starkly and painfully reflect over her relationship with him and it's evolution over the years. This dynamic is the near-highlight of the season. And then we get to Ayane. If Gimai Seikatsu thinks that they have anime's saddest gyaru, Ayane here was trying to give her a run-for-her-money. Her ongoing issues with her self-esteem was given much-needed help by season two's ensemble darkhorse turned (male) hero of this season Kento Miura who was the only person capable of getting through to Ayane (well...almost the only person). As Shouta was in his feelings for most of the season, Kento stepped-up as the only sane male character in the show. Shouta was really out of it in this season as he seemed to not understand how to cope with just being the emotional support for Sawako and nearly destroyed their relationship out the gate before he gets some much-needed wake-up calls from some very unexpected places. This group went on shaky-ground this season, but all came out stronger than before. 

Getting back almost all of the original voice actors was a miracle and it really put me back into the series. The series music was good and always matched the mood of the show. Having the staff from the first two season work with modern equipment really makes a difference and I was always impressed that the composition of the series did not lose the aesthetic of the first two seasons. They could've gone for a more "contemporary" look given they had Netflix money to play with, but one always appreciates keeping the original manga's vision. I also noticed that because each episode was an hour, the story lines could be told in intersecting ways that we normally don't get in your usual thirty minute episode.

All-in-all Kimi ni Todoke uses it's simple, to the point, but sincere storytelling to remind everyone why it is still the gold-standard of shoujo romance in the 21st century. Where other series have done too little or too much, it gets the recipe perfect. I hope they adapt the whole manga and the sequel, but until then I am happy with this.

My Goodreads Review of One Christmas Eve by Langston Hughes

 Haven't read a Christmas story or any LAngston Hughes in a while, so "two birds with one stone." This story reminds me a lot of At Christmas Time by Anton Chekhov.

One Christmas Eve by Langston Hughes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This reminds me of a story my grandmother told me of growing up poor in rural Virginia. While the rest of the United States was in the come-up of the post-WWII economic boom, her community was as poor as they ever been. The youngest of 10, her mom would tell her and her siblings that Santa Claus tried to get there gifts in the house, but accidentally left the. In the fields and hillsides around the house and they had to search for them there. Of course there were no gifts, but they would look in vain anyway.

While we don’t have an explicit location, by context clues the short story here takes place in small-town central Maryland. The only major city named is Baltimore where they could actually afford to build a movie theater for Black people, this town that the story is set in only has a whites-only movie theater. A severely over-worked & underpaid mother is trying to by something for her son to have for Christmas despite being cruelly-underpaid by her white employer whose home she worked in on Christmas Eve! It is her young-son who has an unfortunate run-in with a Santa at a whites-only movie theater lobby that learns the harder lessons of Christmas in the Jim Crow Great Depression era.

This was a short, but bitter story. Nothing big-traumatic happens, but we do get a little loss of innocence here. One does wonder if Hughes meant for this to be a cynical comedy or serious which I can’t tell, but this story does give me a little to think about.

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My Goodreads Review of Marvel's Voices: Indigenous Voices #1

 With all the sorrow of this month, I still haven't forgotten to take some time to honor our Indigenous family this month and I have an excuse to read American comic books again—something I hadn't done in a long time. 

Marvel's Voices: Indigenous Voices #1 by Rebecca Roanhorse
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I haven’t read an American comic book since 2021, so I know I was going to be a little rusty on reviewing one now. I am so use to manga now that several times while reading this I had to stop myself from reading the speech bubbles and text box from right to left. The fact is, I still have fairly substantial back-catalog of western comic books that I need to read and given this is November, good reason to read this short-anthology celebrating Marvel Comics’ Indigenous heroes. This is not the first time reading a comic anthology about Indigenous people as I previously read and reviewed This Place: 150 Years Retold an excellent historical narrative anthology on the history of Indigenous people in Canada. Like in that book, the illustrations vary in quality, but the stories are a good introduction/sample. I really wish there was more here to read, but better than nothing.

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My Goodreads review of Copacetic by Yusef Komunyakaa

 This is my proper into to this poet and more of a check on my to due list as much as anything. Hopefully I get in the mood to read more of his work some day.

Copacetic by Yusef Komunyakaa
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“Tangled in the bell ropes
of each new day,
scribbling on the bottom line
of someone else’s dream,
loitering
in public courtyards
telling statues where to fall.” - from “Soliloquy: Man Talking to a Mirror”

Yusef Komunyakaa is a poet who I knew by reputation before I ever read him. I finally read his work when I read him as part of the anthology Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry and was impressed by what I read. Trying to find something to read by him was difficult, but I chose this book as it was just long-enough to serve as an introduction to him and was early-enough in his career before his more notable works on music and war (he was a Vietnam War veteran). The book was written as a homage to his Jazz heroes, and reflections on his early life in Louisiana and as a soldier abroad (though he never makes a direct reference to his time at war here).

I liked this volume generally. I didn’t have any poems I hate, but there where at least half the poems I really liked. I think the second part of the book is stronger than the first, but I think this is a good volume of early-1980s poetry. Eventually I will likely read more by him one day.

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My Review of The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Been awhile since I read something and been so angry—in a good way—at what was being written about. I felt so enraged about the crimes talked about in this book, but I think it is good to feel righteous anger at this. Well here is my Goodreads review/thoughts on this book.

  The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

All our work dealt with the kind of small particulars of being human that literature generally deals with. But when you live as we have, among a people whose humanity is ever in doubt, even the small and particular—especially the small and particular—becomes political.


What is the duty a writer holds to their audience, themselves, the process? James Baldwin wrote a book of essays trying to answer that in Nobody Knows My Name in 1961 while working on his novel Another Country and as his direct involvement in the Civil Rights Movement was deepening. Now in 2024 we have Ta-Nehisi Coates writing the same sort of book about being a writer and this being a mea culpa about a section of his landmark essay The Case for Reparations in which he listed West Germany paying reparations to the State of Israel which he received immediate blowback for. Coates travels to Senegal, South Carolina, and Israel/Palestine and writes what he sees and feels and it is a harrowing and deeply soul-searching travelogue. This book is 230+ pages, but it felt like it could've been 500 with the emotional weight it put on me. I am still taking in the information in the book, but I really was moved by this book and want to process it.

Senegal

No one has the right to erase my culture, because a community without a culture is a people without human beings" - Léopold Sédar Senghor

Étoile de Dakar - Titeur

Back in 2020-21, I lost quite a few of my family members while the COVID-19 pandemic was ongoing—chief among them my paternal grandmother. I hadn't seen her in person in years and she had been the one who kept so many stories of our family history. It dawned on me that with her gone I would be losing a lot of those stories so I decided to do some amateur genealogy and family history research to preserve the names and stories the best I could. When an African-American takes a consumer DNA test, what they are shown, among other things, is that they share ancestry not with one specific African ethnic group or tribe, but with multiple—sometimes over a dozen. One may share a plurality of ancestry with one ethnic group, but that still is not a lot. This makes claiming ancestry with one group based on biology a bit hallow given that you are related to a lot of different groups. Then you have to remember that most of your known history and culture only concretely begins in North America in 1619. Alex Haley has a lot to answer for. Still, it has always been for that reason that African-Americans have historically taken the lead when it comes to Pan-Africanism and countless figures from Alexander Crummell to W.E.B. Du Bois to Marcus Garvey (West Indian, but still important to African-American history) and so on have dreamed of a strong independent Africa and possibly a place to return to. Liberia and Sierra Leone were founded from such aspirations.

In 2022-23(?) (we are not told of when he went to Senegal, but it was before he went to the Middle East) Ta-Nehisi Coates makes his inaugural journey to Africa—specifically the Republic of Senegal and he spends his time there wrestling with the fact that he was physically in Africa, but it was not the mythical paradise his Black Panther father had told him about growing up nor was it the raging uncivilized hell-hole that white Americans have always told everyone it was. One feature of this book is that while he is telling us about his real-time experiences, he is also giving us background information and lessons on how and why he is experiencing things or what he is writing against. In this case it is hundreds of years of anti-Black racism distorting the history of Africa to justify slavery and colonialism. He is doing this while trying to reconcile if he and the Senegalese people he spends time with can truly close the gap with each other across cultures and histories. He is hopeful, but a bit uncertain. Ironically, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie expressed similar feelings in Americanah on interacting not just with African-Americans, but with other Africans in the novel. Blood ties can only bind people so much and one has to ask what else makes peoples, peoples. He comes to an understanding with himself about these things—what slavery and apartheid has done to him & colonialism and neo-colonialism has done to people in Senegal—and realizes that there has to be a little caution to being so hasty to want an imagined utopia so hastily....but we'll come back to that. There is hope here, as an Americanah, that a real connection in the African diaspora can be made on tangible ground, regardless of reality or myth. This Senegal section was the one that connected to me on the most personal record even if I don't have quite the naivete about Pan-Africanism that Coates has.

South Carolina

Marvin Gaye - Save the Children

"If...we are going to use history for our pleasure and amusement, for inflating our national ego, and giving us a false but pleasurable sense of accomplishment, then we must give up the idea of history either as a science or as an art using the results of science, and admit frankly that we are using a version of historic fact in order to influence and educate the new generation along the way we wish." - W.E.B. Du Bois, "The Propaganda of History" Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880

I remember the 2020 era of Black squares and everyone promising to do better with "The Blacks." What a time! Before the year was even out, the reaction had begun and the first wave of book banning laws were being drafted. Whether it was called "woke" or "CRT" or now "DEI". It was basically a ban on teaching about whoever you didn't like whether it be Black people or LGBT people. One of these places that passed book banning laws was the state of South Carolina a state that had implemented a particularly brutal form of slavery, had one of the most violent reactions to Reconstruction, and fought racial integration particularly hard. The state house in Colombia celebrates all kinds of the worst people in human history and in Chapin, South Carolina the Lexington-Rchland 5 School Board and high school teacher Mary Wood were entering a showdown over Between the World and Me. Coates' book along with works like The Complete Maus, The Bluest Eye, and The Diary of a Young Girl are favorite targets of the right-wing school censors. That particular school board is prone to extreme right-wing parents. This chapter really has Coates reflect on his own time as a student, as well as the history of South Carolina and a deeper meditation of who writes the histories and who decides what histories are read. TNC goes to the school board meeting with Mary Wood that ultimately decided her fate: that we she would be allowed to keep teaching BTW&M. A battle won, but a temporary victory as the forces of white supremacy don't stop working just because they suffer a loss. We would do well to remember that.

Israel/Palastine

"But the state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews; it was created for the salvation of the Western interests. This is what is becoming clear (I must say that it was always clear to me). The Palestinians have been paying for the British colonial policy of “divide and rule” and for Europe’s guilty Christian conscience for more than thirty years. - James Baldwin "Open Letter To The Born Again" (September 29, 1979)

Marcel Khalife - My Mother

So here we are to the heart of the book. I tried to explain what parts 1 & 2 of this book were about because it is here in part 3 that the sum of both narratives reaches a dark conclusion. If part one ("On Pharohs") was about one of the most hated and wretched people of the world trying to connect to each other in a supposed homeland of paradise, but question if there can be such a thing as a utopian homeland; If part 2 ("Bearing the Flaming Cross") is about the fight to control the history, narrative, and basic information of this wretched people constantly; part 3 is a cautionary tale about another very despised people who manage to establish a homeland and promote their own narrative about it...at a terrible price. They make their land and their narrative according to the designs and whim of the very people who had spent thousands of years persecuting them. A freedom achieved not though good faith, but through the use of colonialism and apartheid against another group of people.

I'd known about this conflict between Israel and the Palestinians all my life, but it was witnessing the brutality against the Palestinians between 2009-2012 that made things clear to me on this issue. While for me it seemed clear, for others it as taken a lot longer to see and with genocide as the trigger. But this section is where Coates brings all of his journalistic efforts to bare as he goes through a very intimate look at how antisemitism and Zionism found a common goal with each other and the Holocaust became the perfect pretext to accomplish a two-fold goal:

1. Get the majority of Jewish people out of the West (something the Holocaust had two-thirds accomplished) and 2. Set-up a colonial state in the Middle East to keep the Arabs in-check. The natives (in this case the Palestinians) would be the only real losers so nobody would care.

Accomplishing this would see the United States as the main model (along with Apartheid South Africa after 1967). The genocide of Indigenous people in North America and the régime of racial segregation laws that spread throughout the United States of America and targeted only non-white people and effectively turned a quarter of the United States into an undemocratic totalitarian state. Imagine if Jim Crow-era South Carolina or Mississippi was transported to the Levant and funded by the United States and allies. The catalogue of atrocities, by which I mean not just the physical violence, but the violence of the state itself against through its laws and customs against all it deems outsiders or minorities that is so galling to comprehend. I currently live just across the highway from the former plantation that my family was enslaved on. I have talked with grandparents and a great-grandparent on their experiences living under the Jim Crow régime. I even found an old newspaper advertisement for the auctioning of one of my 3x great-grandparent and his siblings. It truly hits one to see such a legacy being alive and well today to be used against another people funded with my tax dollars (I had an antebellum-era newly-freed 4th great-grandfather who was taxed $5 a year for being a "free person of color" in Virginia. That money was used to fund the continued enslavement of his brother and family). It's made all the more tragic that the people doing it would by conventional-wisdom be the last folks to do this.

I had always suspected this as my knowledge of world history expanded, but being a victim does not preclude you from being a victimizer. Kendrick Lamar said, "Hurt people, hurt people." Alas, he was more right than he knew. Coates realized that even the victims of the Holocaust could endorse apartheid and ultimately genocide. It is a tragedy that Coates lays out in magisterial detail from the moment he begins this section at Yed Vashem (the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem) to the ending with Palestinian-Americans in Chicago. This is as much a long-form journalistic narrative and history as it is an example of writing to haunt...speaking of which.

To Sum It Up

The book's stated goal was to show young writers how to write to haunt the reader as Rakim the MC haunted him as a listener. Like Between the World and Me, this book is written as an epistolary non-fiction essay. For all his atheism, Ta-Nehisi Coates is seemingly trying to make the case for being the successor to Saint Paul as far as the use of letter-writing to tell his stories. I am not a big fan of this format, but I still appreciated what he wrote here and I was definitely haunted by it.

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