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D. Gray-man! Optimism high
Sep. 21st, 2010 01:23 pmAnd then there's D. Gray-man. A lot of people have been talking about it going downhill. Mostly they're complaining about the "rushing", but it hasn't felt rushed to me. I do think the pacing started off really, really awkward in this last arc...
...But Hoshino is a fallible human being like everyone else. She went from a 15-page weekly format to a monthly format that ranges up to three times that length. It's natural that she needed a few months to get the hang of it: to figure out how to pace things so that she packed in enough information/action to satisfy her readers for a month, without just cramming things in there all in a rush. She obviously was flailing at the beginning of the arc when the switch went into effect.
We're all sad that she hasn't gotten to Lavi, and we're all sad that the artstyle has gotten kind of wonky and unpredictable and suddenly everyone has the same face. And she's contradicted herself once or twice in minor ways.
But it doesn't feel like Hoshino has said, "Okay, I'm just going to trash the following plot points." The rushing isn't that kind of rushing. We suddenly cram in all this stuff about Alma Karma only as soon as he became significant, for instance. But on the other hand, she's been foreshadowing this storyline for as long as we've known Kanda: we've always known there was a special person, we've always known the name "Yu" bothers him, etc. And she's gone to great lengths to delicately craft Kanda's backstory with a lot of attention and detail.
She rearranged her story plans, probably. But is she rushing the way KT is? Not really. Are we at the big climax and going to end the series? Absolutely not -- this is an incident of scaled-up tension that might make Kanda go crystal-type -- that's all.
( And now, to talk about the last chapter... )
...so, on that note, is anyone up for doing the scan-manipulating part of scanslations of Gray Ark, or should I just publish the text without worrying about the scans?
...But Hoshino is a fallible human being like everyone else. She went from a 15-page weekly format to a monthly format that ranges up to three times that length. It's natural that she needed a few months to get the hang of it: to figure out how to pace things so that she packed in enough information/action to satisfy her readers for a month, without just cramming things in there all in a rush. She obviously was flailing at the beginning of the arc when the switch went into effect.
We're all sad that she hasn't gotten to Lavi, and we're all sad that the artstyle has gotten kind of wonky and unpredictable and suddenly everyone has the same face. And she's contradicted herself once or twice in minor ways.
But it doesn't feel like Hoshino has said, "Okay, I'm just going to trash the following plot points." The rushing isn't that kind of rushing. We suddenly cram in all this stuff about Alma Karma only as soon as he became significant, for instance. But on the other hand, she's been foreshadowing this storyline for as long as we've known Kanda: we've always known there was a special person, we've always known the name "Yu" bothers him, etc. And she's gone to great lengths to delicately craft Kanda's backstory with a lot of attention and detail.
She rearranged her story plans, probably. But is she rushing the way KT is? Not really. Are we at the big climax and going to end the series? Absolutely not -- this is an incident of scaled-up tension that might make Kanda go crystal-type -- that's all.
( And now, to talk about the last chapter... )
...so, on that note, is anyone up for doing the scan-manipulating part of scanslations of Gray Ark, or should I just publish the text without worrying about the scans?