Petshop of Horrors.
Mar. 10th, 2005 03:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elwenSo I finished reading Petshop of Horrors.
[If you don't know already, you probably don't care, but Petshop of Horrors is a 10 volume manga series by Akino Matsuri about a pet shop with everything from ordinary housepets to mystical animals, all of whom tend to appear in human form to the people who buy them. The pets tend to have a large effect on their owner's lives; as the title would indicate, a lot of times not in a good way. I'd say its genres are mystery, horror, and fantasy, and it gets more shoujo as the series progresses.]
I really, really liked the series. The early volumes were a bit more gruesome than is my taste, but the cynicism and themes on human nature were interesting. It really becomes a lot less horrific as the series progresses, though. There's more empathy in the stories, and they tend to have less tragic endings. And the art is gorgeous. I've become a big fan of Akino-sensei in general now -- since Night Exile is scanlating all her works that we can -- but one of the bonuses with PSH is when she illustrates the animals in human form. The costumes are beautiful and always so appropriate in subtle ways.
I was really sad when I found out the series had ended -- I guess it ended a while ago, but I'd never been able to find the Japanese manga, so this is actually the only Japanese series for which I read the English versions. [Which aren't that bad. I'm not so obsessed with the series that I want to know exactly what the characters are saying, like I insist for most of CLAMP's series. I'm sure if I read the originals I would be annoyed at the translation liberties they took, but I'm learning to be more flexible in terms of adaptations and not so much straight translations. Although there was that really wonky part when they translated mohawk (as in the hairstyle) as "Mohican". Talk about missing the point.] But yeah, so apparently there is a "Shin Petshop of Horrors" series now. [Must go look for it at Kinokuniya when I go home for break.] Night Exile released the first chapter, and it seems like it's in the same vein as the stories from the middle of the original series, when things were in their "groove" that I really liked.
I think what really changed the feel of the series and won me over completely was the introduction of Chris. I was really skeptical when I read the preview and was like, "What the hell, Leon's brother?" But it made a huge difference to have an innocent child's perspective of the pet shop. And it probably softened D towards humans a lot. No wonder Chris leaving was basically what brought about the end of the series; I couldn't really imagine things reverting to how they had been before Chris showed up, although I suppose that's what the new series is like, except with the shoujo-ness that Chris brought.
A good example of Chris' effect is how my opinion of T-chan changed. I guess he was kind of cool when he was first introduced, but after he joined D, I really didn't like him. He looked really evil and scary at the end of that chapter. I guess we really didn't see him again until Chris met him, and then he was much more like a punk than this malevolent man-eater. I think the entire art style changed around that point to become more shoujo, and T-chan's character design definitely saw a lot of that. I mean, he was all cute and fluffy in animal form, too. Whereas the first time he looked really silky, but, I say again, evil. It was really indicative when, after Chris regained his voice, he came back and saw the pets in animal form, and T-chan basically had his original look back, and even Pon-chan looked a lot more rabid and wild than she had been drawn before.
I thought the ending was kind of weird, although it was nice to have so many things explained at last. Didn't really like the ominous idea that the cycle of detective and count repeats all the time, but I thought there was more history between D's father and Vesca, and that was why Vesca hesitated to shoot at the end. Maybe I'm just reading too much into it. But then... so Q-chan is D's grandfather, but the child he took away was from D's father, which would make him D's brother?! And Chris is Leon's brother. So there's a double cycle? That confused me a lot. If there is a pattern like that, when every D ends up meeting a detective and so on, I want the pattern to be more rigorous, darnit. Ah well...
So from the new series I guess D ended up going to Shinjuku... who knows where that fits in the timeline between Leon waking up in the hospital and grown-up Chris finding the other D in San Francisco. I wonder if Leon will show up in the new series, though, and whether the two will end up like Vesca and D's father. [Gah, it's annoying that they're all named D.] At least, though, I hope she'll explore whether Chris permanently softened D towards humans, or whether D will go back to being totally cynical and vengeful. I actually tend to agree with that a lot, how humans suck in the way they destroy other species. To drag in something else, it's like in the Hyperion Cantos when the Consul talked about the way humans wiped out every species that seemed even almost intelligent. But yeah, so when D was looking at the passenger pigeons, and the buffalo, and the wolves, I really agree that we should be made to recognize our wrongs. But I guess it doesn't really work that way.
Since I'm talking about Akino-sensei anyway, I read what is apparently one of her really old works, Reikan Shouhou Kabushiki-gaisha (what a mouthful), which is something like an agency that deals with spirits. Anyway, I just wanted to say that the art is so completely different from PSH and Elixir. The protagonist looks like Mamoru from Sailor Moon, especially his hair. And all the character designs are just very standard shoujo. And yet I can still sense her style in the series, maybe just through the story. It's kinda neat.
[If you don't know already, you probably don't care, but Petshop of Horrors is a 10 volume manga series by Akino Matsuri about a pet shop with everything from ordinary housepets to mystical animals, all of whom tend to appear in human form to the people who buy them. The pets tend to have a large effect on their owner's lives; as the title would indicate, a lot of times not in a good way. I'd say its genres are mystery, horror, and fantasy, and it gets more shoujo as the series progresses.]
I really, really liked the series. The early volumes were a bit more gruesome than is my taste, but the cynicism and themes on human nature were interesting. It really becomes a lot less horrific as the series progresses, though. There's more empathy in the stories, and they tend to have less tragic endings. And the art is gorgeous. I've become a big fan of Akino-sensei in general now -- since Night Exile is scanlating all her works that we can -- but one of the bonuses with PSH is when she illustrates the animals in human form. The costumes are beautiful and always so appropriate in subtle ways.
I was really sad when I found out the series had ended -- I guess it ended a while ago, but I'd never been able to find the Japanese manga, so this is actually the only Japanese series for which I read the English versions. [Which aren't that bad. I'm not so obsessed with the series that I want to know exactly what the characters are saying, like I insist for most of CLAMP's series. I'm sure if I read the originals I would be annoyed at the translation liberties they took, but I'm learning to be more flexible in terms of adaptations and not so much straight translations. Although there was that really wonky part when they translated mohawk (as in the hairstyle) as "Mohican". Talk about missing the point.] But yeah, so apparently there is a "Shin Petshop of Horrors" series now. [Must go look for it at Kinokuniya when I go home for break.] Night Exile released the first chapter, and it seems like it's in the same vein as the stories from the middle of the original series, when things were in their "groove" that I really liked.
I think what really changed the feel of the series and won me over completely was the introduction of Chris. I was really skeptical when I read the preview and was like, "What the hell, Leon's brother?" But it made a huge difference to have an innocent child's perspective of the pet shop. And it probably softened D towards humans a lot. No wonder Chris leaving was basically what brought about the end of the series; I couldn't really imagine things reverting to how they had been before Chris showed up, although I suppose that's what the new series is like, except with the shoujo-ness that Chris brought.
A good example of Chris' effect is how my opinion of T-chan changed. I guess he was kind of cool when he was first introduced, but after he joined D, I really didn't like him. He looked really evil and scary at the end of that chapter. I guess we really didn't see him again until Chris met him, and then he was much more like a punk than this malevolent man-eater. I think the entire art style changed around that point to become more shoujo, and T-chan's character design definitely saw a lot of that. I mean, he was all cute and fluffy in animal form, too. Whereas the first time he looked really silky, but, I say again, evil. It was really indicative when, after Chris regained his voice, he came back and saw the pets in animal form, and T-chan basically had his original look back, and even Pon-chan looked a lot more rabid and wild than she had been drawn before.
I thought the ending was kind of weird, although it was nice to have so many things explained at last. Didn't really like the ominous idea that the cycle of detective and count repeats all the time, but I thought there was more history between D's father and Vesca, and that was why Vesca hesitated to shoot at the end. Maybe I'm just reading too much into it. But then... so Q-chan is D's grandfather, but the child he took away was from D's father, which would make him D's brother?! And Chris is Leon's brother. So there's a double cycle? That confused me a lot. If there is a pattern like that, when every D ends up meeting a detective and so on, I want the pattern to be more rigorous, darnit. Ah well...
So from the new series I guess D ended up going to Shinjuku... who knows where that fits in the timeline between Leon waking up in the hospital and grown-up Chris finding the other D in San Francisco. I wonder if Leon will show up in the new series, though, and whether the two will end up like Vesca and D's father. [Gah, it's annoying that they're all named D.] At least, though, I hope she'll explore whether Chris permanently softened D towards humans, or whether D will go back to being totally cynical and vengeful. I actually tend to agree with that a lot, how humans suck in the way they destroy other species. To drag in something else, it's like in the Hyperion Cantos when the Consul talked about the way humans wiped out every species that seemed even almost intelligent. But yeah, so when D was looking at the passenger pigeons, and the buffalo, and the wolves, I really agree that we should be made to recognize our wrongs. But I guess it doesn't really work that way.
Since I'm talking about Akino-sensei anyway, I read what is apparently one of her really old works, Reikan Shouhou Kabushiki-gaisha (what a mouthful), which is something like an agency that deals with spirits. Anyway, I just wanted to say that the art is so completely different from PSH and Elixir. The protagonist looks like Mamoru from Sailor Moon, especially his hair. And all the character designs are just very standard shoujo. And yet I can still sense her style in the series, maybe just through the story. It's kinda neat.
