My answers for the BinGO fest over on Hikarunogo on DW (part 1)!!
1.What are your thoughts on the translation of the series from manga to anime?
Actually, I saw the anime first and read the manga later. I’m more of a moving images with sound kinda person. When we did an earlier re-read, I did a re-watch at the same time and had a good chance to compare the two. From a practical point, apart from some re shuffling of the scenes in the first 3 eps to have the Sai vs. Akira game in the first ep, the anime version is scene perfect and pretty much word perfect. What more could you want?
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2. Tsutsui’s title is "the founder”, do you feel that this is an accurate title?
Absolutely! As the founder of the Haze High Go Club, a club that survived Shindou Hikaru’s whirlwind attendance and saw Fujisaki Akari take part in the High School Tournament, I think we can proudly calling Tsutsui a true founder and inspiration or young Go players! I hope he will have taken his talent on to University and later on into his job, whatever that may be.
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3. Do you think that go itself is symbolic?
Oh yes! Go, and other games like it, are always a symbol for something out of real life; usually representations of battles, so strategy can be practiced without any real killing. And in the story Hikaru likens the stones on the board to the stars in sky, a very pretty thought, if not very original.
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6. Touya Kouyou’s title is "the master”, what does this mean to you?
Touya Kouyo’s function in the story is to be the Ultimate Goal. Most directly for Sai, really - the Meijin is his true rival, they both now it - but also indirectly for Hikaru, who finds his true rival in Touya Akira, who in turn had always aimed to have his father as his rival, but then got ‘side tracked’ and most entertainingly so!
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7. What is your favorite quote?
Japanese or English? Actually, to me, HnG doesn’t have that many good quotes; I can’t even think of one mediocre one right now… I do love the way Sai can whine ‘Hikaruuuuuu, let me play!’ but that’s hardly a good quote ;-)
I’ve found it’s actually quite hard to get a real favorite quote out of a show that is not in a language I actively know. Having the subtitles is very nice, but I know it’s a translation, an interpretation; it can’t be anything else and as such, a quote from that is not an exact quote. On the other hand, my Japanese is not good enough (yet, or possibly ever) that I can really appreciate the original text and therefore I can’t know if it is ‘quote material’. So, that leaves me without a favorite quote, I guess…
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8. Akari’s title is "the neighbor”, what does this mean to you?
Oh dear, yes. Poor Akari, always the neighbor, never the girl friend. She did everything but dance naked in front of Hikaru to get his attention. And she might even have done that, had she been a few years older! But Hikaru was just too young, and really, so was Akari. And then Go took all of Hikaru’s attention away, and that was that. So, that leaves Akari as the nice neighborhood friend that got left behind.
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9. Akari’s title is "the neighbor”, what does this mean to you?
Oh dear, yes. Poor Akari, always the neighbor, never the girl friend. She did everything but dance naked in front of Hikaru to get his attention. And she might even have done that, had she been a few years older! But Hikaru was just too young, and really, so was Akari. And then Go took all of Hikaru’s attention away, and that was that. So, that leaves Akari as the nice neighborhood friend that got left behind.
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10. I’ve seen fanon that Isumi is a stud muffin to girls. How do you think Isumi actually interacts with girls in "real life"?
The real world of any profession is usually also populated with ‘normal’ people; I always took Isumi to be one of those normal people. Of course the fact that he’s a character in a manga/anime improves his looks instantly, but still he’s supposed to be normal (as far as anyone ever is…) As for any interactions with girls, well only very few of the males in Hikaru no Go react to the presence of the few girls there; Hikaru basically ignores Akari’s femaleness and none of the insei seem to notice that Nase has in fact breasts. Of course for quite a few of the boys their young age is a good excuse, but not so for Isumi; he’s 18+ when he passes the Pro Exam, so no excuse there. Not that I think there is anything wrong with Isumi’s adult development; he’s a perfectly healthy male specimen. What I think is going on is that his choice of profession (and that of most of the other characters) eats up all his ambition and passion, leaving him satisfied enough not to need a girlfriend too to complete his life. I do expect his mom to start harassing him to think about marriage once he’s 25 or so, thus ensuring a small horde of Isumi chibis to populate the future. ;-)
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12. Do you have any thoughts on the appeal of Sai/Hikaru.
Oh, loads!
First of all, and this goes for any pairing, in any fandom; if you don’t find them interesting as characters, you will never see the appeal of the pairing.
Okay, now we’ve established that, let’s get back to Sai/Hikaru. Sai and Hikaru are the ultimate star crossed lovers; Sai is a thousand years dead and has already been whisked away before Hikaru even realizes how he felt about Sai. That much is in the canon; after Sai is gone Hikaru pretty much goes to pieces. If you look carefully, he goes through the official Five Stages of Grief, pretty much exactly: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and finally Acceptance. You don’t do all that for just anybody; Hikaru loved Sai, that is as plain as day.
That Sai cared very much for Hikaru is also shown, though not quite so dramatically. Sai, as a ghost with no ability to affect the world, is in a very bad position; he needs Hikaru’s co-operation for his most basic need of playing Go. But time and time again, when Sai could(/should) have forced the issue, he backed down and let Hikaru’s interests prevail. The most telling of these instances is Hikaru’s Shinshodan game against Touya Meijijn. It was not easy for Sai to back-down at that point, but he did it. And as the story goes on from there, he gradually stops asking Hikaru to let him play others. Sai’s regard for Hikaru starts to outweigh his need for Go. If that isn’t love, I don’t know what is.
So, in my book they love each other (platonically or not, whichever) (Insert a whole dissertation on ‘Why slash/yaoi/?’ which I’ll save for another day). But they are still star-crossed; one is gone before the other is mature enough to know he loved him. And this is where the fun starts; in order to bring them together a story will need plot! Loads of plot! I just love plot! Squeeeee!!!!
Ahem. So, in order to get them together you automatically need a plot and from there on it is still a matter of whether or not you like the characters, which I do, for the story to become interesting and the pairing appealing. It’s a matter of taste really…
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13. Zhao Shi’s title is "the naturalist”, do you feel that this is an accurate title?
Well, in a ‘outa the mouths babes’ sorta way, but no not really. I think he’s just very young, pretty much the same as with Le Ping; they’re speaking the truth bluntly ‘cause they are young and people don’t get upset with them for speaking the truth for that same reason. It’d be interesting if either still have that quality in 5 years time…
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14. What are your thoughts on Sai possessing Hikaru?
When I watched the show for the first time I was very worried that Sai might turn out to be a malicious poltergeist when Hikaru proved unwilling to let him play Go. Luckily they decided not to go that route, if they had I probably would have stopped watching; I’m not very interested in horror. But my western bred mind was very worried here; that is what quite probably would have happened, had this been an European story. But it isn’t and it didn’t, for whatever reason, and that made me very happy.
The whole possession and the subsequent ‘power struggle’ of who gets to play ‘for real’ is very interesting. The way that Sai takes over (by permission) Hikaru’s game at the first Junior High Tournament and the way Hikaru takes over the game against Akira from Sai at the second, strikes me as utterly wrong and I totally understand Akira’s outrage at that second game.
The reason it screams ‘wrong!’ at me is that it is a form of cheating, like any kind of prompting by someone else during tests, etc. In the first game (Sawara’s third board vs. Sai (through Hikaru)) from the Sawara third board’s point of view, Hikaru’s style suddenly dramatically changes, rising in rank by several hundred levels. So all the strategies this poor guy had thought up and all the information on Hikaru’s style that he had gleaned from the earlier part of the game, just go out the window and he just gets crushed. That is not right, seriously!
But the reverse is also bad; when Hikaru takes back the control of the game against Akira from Sai. From Akira’s point of view he feels he’s being swindled or disrespected (by the sudden drop in skill level) and he blows his top (quite rightly so). It’s, of course, all part of the plot when Hikaru and Sai have to figure out how to make it work, if they can.
But all that is seeing the situation from a modern, heavily influenced by the western world, perspective. But this story is not set in the west (though doubtlessly in the modern world, which is in Japan indeed heavily influenced by the west) but in the east where ancestor worship still is normal and isn’t Sai a true ancestor? Maybe they picked the Heian period as Sai’s original time to make sure that, with 1000 between then and now, he counts as an ancestor in anyone’s book. And, seen in the light that it is perfectly okay to let your ancestors guide you along your path, the whole Sai & Hikaru playing musical chairs with who gets to play, isn’t quite so bad…
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15. Has Hikaru no Go inspired you to learn about Go in the real world?
Inspired? Yes. But I started too late and my brain won’t bend that way anymore, alas, so I pretty much suck at it. I do understand why the Pro exam is not for over the 30s. And I think setting the limit at 30 is stretching it a bit; late 20s is probably too old already… But reading about the Go Pro world as research for fic writing is fun, so yes, I was indeed inspired to take an interest in something I had only vaguely heard of before.
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16. How do you feel about go vs. other board games?
I love a good board game and Go is a great one. The only trouble with is that the concept of Go has been reduced to become the most abstract of games, it has become a bit inaccessible for a newbie player; making it hard to start playing it. At least with something like Chess you have the recognizable elements of a King a Queen and a Knight.
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18. Is there a song you associate with a Hikaru no Go character/ship (or with the series in general)
The anime music, really. I’m not that much of a music associated with something other than it came with. I associate a pop song with the singer and the video (if I ever saw one). I in particular associate the piano suites from HnG with the Sai&Hikaru relationship, but all the other HnG music also puts me in mind of Sai and or Hikaru also.
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19. Ashiwara’s title is "the optimist”, is there a title that you think would be more accurate?
Actually, I think he’s a pessimist; he thinks too low of things/people. Remember what he advised Akira after that 4 way tie that Akira purposefully played against that Fat Cat and his aide and body guards? Ashiwara basically told Akira not to try so hard on games of no consequence. Well, I do think that Sai would say that every game is of consequence and deserves your best play. Remember Sai played Akari just before he played the Meijin on NetGo; no game is too small for him!
So I think “the pessimist” is a better title.
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20. What are your thoughts on the music of the anime?
As with all film/tv music scores, good, bad or indifferent, the music is as much part of the show as the pictures are. Together they ‘make’ the scene, giving the story a chance to shine. The music to Hikaru no Go does that sometimes in a run-of-the-mill anime-type normal way, but there are also lovely peeks like the piano suite Mae o Muite and the one that belongs to the Tomadoi. The music expresses the emotions that were seen in the show; on their own, without the show as a reference, it only has half the brilliance. And so I choke up when I hear Kami no Itte whereas someone else might shrug their shoulders.
And, you know, I do think that music for film and tv is meant to do exactly that; illustrate the emotions in the story. No more , no less. And, to me, it’s world class stuff!
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21 What do you think of the theory that Hikaru no Go is a thinly veiled gay romance?
I’m sorry, as much as some people might want that to be so, I totally discount that theory. At the moment it’s the trend that any two appetizing boys (and sometimes not so appetizing; there is really no accounting for taste) in any show, film or book are ‘slashed’/’yaoified’. The idea of writing gay fanfic on existing characters is as old as “Sherlock Holmes” (the original Holmes, published in the 1890s), there were already rumors going ‘round as early as the 1920s. So, as much as I think that “Sherlock Holmes” was written as a thinly veiled gay romance by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, do I think that “Hikaru no Go” was by Obata & Hotta, which is to say: not at all.
Not saying that I don’t read either HnG slash nor SH slash; I do and I love it! But I don’t think for a moment either had been intended to be viewed that way and should I ever meet either authors (either in this life or in the hereafter) I shan’t be mentioning that I read the gay fanfic; it just wouldn’t be nice.
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23. Is there a series you’d like to cross Hikaru no Go over with?
Ah well, with my other most favorite fandom: Harry Potter, of course! I was going to write a little drabble here but Ver pretty much covered the more obvious aspects of a HnG/HP crossover, so I’m recommending you go read hers instead. You’ll find it here: http://archiveofourown.org/works/290946 “A Lesson in Wizard's Chess” by Ver (verloren1983).
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Actually, I saw the anime first and read the manga later. I’m more of a moving images with sound kinda person. When we did an earlier re-read, I did a re-watch at the same time and had a good chance to compare the two. From a practical point, apart from some re shuffling of the scenes in the first 3 eps to have the Sai vs. Akira game in the first ep, the anime version is scene perfect and pretty much word perfect. What more could you want?
~~~~~~
2. Tsutsui’s title is "the founder”, do you feel that this is an accurate title?
Absolutely! As the founder of the Haze High Go Club, a club that survived Shindou Hikaru’s whirlwind attendance and saw Fujisaki Akari take part in the High School Tournament, I think we can proudly calling Tsutsui a true founder and inspiration or young Go players! I hope he will have taken his talent on to University and later on into his job, whatever that may be.
~~~~~~
3. Do you think that go itself is symbolic?
Oh yes! Go, and other games like it, are always a symbol for something out of real life; usually representations of battles, so strategy can be practiced without any real killing. And in the story Hikaru likens the stones on the board to the stars in sky, a very pretty thought, if not very original.
~~~~~~
6. Touya Kouyou’s title is "the master”, what does this mean to you?
Touya Kouyo’s function in the story is to be the Ultimate Goal. Most directly for Sai, really - the Meijin is his true rival, they both now it - but also indirectly for Hikaru, who finds his true rival in Touya Akira, who in turn had always aimed to have his father as his rival, but then got ‘side tracked’ and most entertainingly so!
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7. What is your favorite quote?
Japanese or English? Actually, to me, HnG doesn’t have that many good quotes; I can’t even think of one mediocre one right now… I do love the way Sai can whine ‘Hikaruuuuuu, let me play!’ but that’s hardly a good quote ;-)
I’ve found it’s actually quite hard to get a real favorite quote out of a show that is not in a language I actively know. Having the subtitles is very nice, but I know it’s a translation, an interpretation; it can’t be anything else and as such, a quote from that is not an exact quote. On the other hand, my Japanese is not good enough (yet, or possibly ever) that I can really appreciate the original text and therefore I can’t know if it is ‘quote material’. So, that leaves me without a favorite quote, I guess…
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8. Akari’s title is "the neighbor”, what does this mean to you?
Oh dear, yes. Poor Akari, always the neighbor, never the girl friend. She did everything but dance naked in front of Hikaru to get his attention. And she might even have done that, had she been a few years older! But Hikaru was just too young, and really, so was Akari. And then Go took all of Hikaru’s attention away, and that was that. So, that leaves Akari as the nice neighborhood friend that got left behind.
~~~~~~
9. Akari’s title is "the neighbor”, what does this mean to you?
Oh dear, yes. Poor Akari, always the neighbor, never the girl friend. She did everything but dance naked in front of Hikaru to get his attention. And she might even have done that, had she been a few years older! But Hikaru was just too young, and really, so was Akari. And then Go took all of Hikaru’s attention away, and that was that. So, that leaves Akari as the nice neighborhood friend that got left behind.
~~~~~~
10. I’ve seen fanon that Isumi is a stud muffin to girls. How do you think Isumi actually interacts with girls in "real life"?
The real world of any profession is usually also populated with ‘normal’ people; I always took Isumi to be one of those normal people. Of course the fact that he’s a character in a manga/anime improves his looks instantly, but still he’s supposed to be normal (as far as anyone ever is…) As for any interactions with girls, well only very few of the males in Hikaru no Go react to the presence of the few girls there; Hikaru basically ignores Akari’s femaleness and none of the insei seem to notice that Nase has in fact breasts. Of course for quite a few of the boys their young age is a good excuse, but not so for Isumi; he’s 18+ when he passes the Pro Exam, so no excuse there. Not that I think there is anything wrong with Isumi’s adult development; he’s a perfectly healthy male specimen. What I think is going on is that his choice of profession (and that of most of the other characters) eats up all his ambition and passion, leaving him satisfied enough not to need a girlfriend too to complete his life. I do expect his mom to start harassing him to think about marriage once he’s 25 or so, thus ensuring a small horde of Isumi chibis to populate the future. ;-)
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12. Do you have any thoughts on the appeal of Sai/Hikaru.
Oh, loads!
First of all, and this goes for any pairing, in any fandom; if you don’t find them interesting as characters, you will never see the appeal of the pairing.
Okay, now we’ve established that, let’s get back to Sai/Hikaru. Sai and Hikaru are the ultimate star crossed lovers; Sai is a thousand years dead and has already been whisked away before Hikaru even realizes how he felt about Sai. That much is in the canon; after Sai is gone Hikaru pretty much goes to pieces. If you look carefully, he goes through the official Five Stages of Grief, pretty much exactly: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and finally Acceptance. You don’t do all that for just anybody; Hikaru loved Sai, that is as plain as day.
That Sai cared very much for Hikaru is also shown, though not quite so dramatically. Sai, as a ghost with no ability to affect the world, is in a very bad position; he needs Hikaru’s co-operation for his most basic need of playing Go. But time and time again, when Sai could(/should) have forced the issue, he backed down and let Hikaru’s interests prevail. The most telling of these instances is Hikaru’s Shinshodan game against Touya Meijijn. It was not easy for Sai to back-down at that point, but he did it. And as the story goes on from there, he gradually stops asking Hikaru to let him play others. Sai’s regard for Hikaru starts to outweigh his need for Go. If that isn’t love, I don’t know what is.
So, in my book they love each other (platonically or not, whichever) (Insert a whole dissertation on ‘Why slash/yaoi/?’ which I’ll save for another day). But they are still star-crossed; one is gone before the other is mature enough to know he loved him. And this is where the fun starts; in order to bring them together a story will need plot! Loads of plot! I just love plot! Squeeeee!!!!
Ahem. So, in order to get them together you automatically need a plot and from there on it is still a matter of whether or not you like the characters, which I do, for the story to become interesting and the pairing appealing. It’s a matter of taste really…
~~~~~~
13. Zhao Shi’s title is "the naturalist”, do you feel that this is an accurate title?
Well, in a ‘outa the mouths babes’ sorta way, but no not really. I think he’s just very young, pretty much the same as with Le Ping; they’re speaking the truth bluntly ‘cause they are young and people don’t get upset with them for speaking the truth for that same reason. It’d be interesting if either still have that quality in 5 years time…
~~~~~~
14. What are your thoughts on Sai possessing Hikaru?
When I watched the show for the first time I was very worried that Sai might turn out to be a malicious poltergeist when Hikaru proved unwilling to let him play Go. Luckily they decided not to go that route, if they had I probably would have stopped watching; I’m not very interested in horror. But my western bred mind was very worried here; that is what quite probably would have happened, had this been an European story. But it isn’t and it didn’t, for whatever reason, and that made me very happy.
The whole possession and the subsequent ‘power struggle’ of who gets to play ‘for real’ is very interesting. The way that Sai takes over (by permission) Hikaru’s game at the first Junior High Tournament and the way Hikaru takes over the game against Akira from Sai at the second, strikes me as utterly wrong and I totally understand Akira’s outrage at that second game.
The reason it screams ‘wrong!’ at me is that it is a form of cheating, like any kind of prompting by someone else during tests, etc. In the first game (Sawara’s third board vs. Sai (through Hikaru)) from the Sawara third board’s point of view, Hikaru’s style suddenly dramatically changes, rising in rank by several hundred levels. So all the strategies this poor guy had thought up and all the information on Hikaru’s style that he had gleaned from the earlier part of the game, just go out the window and he just gets crushed. That is not right, seriously!
But the reverse is also bad; when Hikaru takes back the control of the game against Akira from Sai. From Akira’s point of view he feels he’s being swindled or disrespected (by the sudden drop in skill level) and he blows his top (quite rightly so). It’s, of course, all part of the plot when Hikaru and Sai have to figure out how to make it work, if they can.
But all that is seeing the situation from a modern, heavily influenced by the western world, perspective. But this story is not set in the west (though doubtlessly in the modern world, which is in Japan indeed heavily influenced by the west) but in the east where ancestor worship still is normal and isn’t Sai a true ancestor? Maybe they picked the Heian period as Sai’s original time to make sure that, with 1000 between then and now, he counts as an ancestor in anyone’s book. And, seen in the light that it is perfectly okay to let your ancestors guide you along your path, the whole Sai & Hikaru playing musical chairs with who gets to play, isn’t quite so bad…
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15. Has Hikaru no Go inspired you to learn about Go in the real world?
Inspired? Yes. But I started too late and my brain won’t bend that way anymore, alas, so I pretty much suck at it. I do understand why the Pro exam is not for over the 30s. And I think setting the limit at 30 is stretching it a bit; late 20s is probably too old already… But reading about the Go Pro world as research for fic writing is fun, so yes, I was indeed inspired to take an interest in something I had only vaguely heard of before.
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16. How do you feel about go vs. other board games?
I love a good board game and Go is a great one. The only trouble with is that the concept of Go has been reduced to become the most abstract of games, it has become a bit inaccessible for a newbie player; making it hard to start playing it. At least with something like Chess you have the recognizable elements of a King a Queen and a Knight.
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18. Is there a song you associate with a Hikaru no Go character/ship (or with the series in general)
The anime music, really. I’m not that much of a music associated with something other than it came with. I associate a pop song with the singer and the video (if I ever saw one). I in particular associate the piano suites from HnG with the Sai&Hikaru relationship, but all the other HnG music also puts me in mind of Sai and or Hikaru also.
~~~~~~
19. Ashiwara’s title is "the optimist”, is there a title that you think would be more accurate?
Actually, I think he’s a pessimist; he thinks too low of things/people. Remember what he advised Akira after that 4 way tie that Akira purposefully played against that Fat Cat and his aide and body guards? Ashiwara basically told Akira not to try so hard on games of no consequence. Well, I do think that Sai would say that every game is of consequence and deserves your best play. Remember Sai played Akari just before he played the Meijin on NetGo; no game is too small for him!
So I think “the pessimist” is a better title.
~~~~~~
20. What are your thoughts on the music of the anime?
As with all film/tv music scores, good, bad or indifferent, the music is as much part of the show as the pictures are. Together they ‘make’ the scene, giving the story a chance to shine. The music to Hikaru no Go does that sometimes in a run-of-the-mill anime-type normal way, but there are also lovely peeks like the piano suite Mae o Muite and the one that belongs to the Tomadoi. The music expresses the emotions that were seen in the show; on their own, without the show as a reference, it only has half the brilliance. And so I choke up when I hear Kami no Itte whereas someone else might shrug their shoulders.
And, you know, I do think that music for film and tv is meant to do exactly that; illustrate the emotions in the story. No more , no less. And, to me, it’s world class stuff!
~~~~~~
21 What do you think of the theory that Hikaru no Go is a thinly veiled gay romance?
I’m sorry, as much as some people might want that to be so, I totally discount that theory. At the moment it’s the trend that any two appetizing boys (and sometimes not so appetizing; there is really no accounting for taste) in any show, film or book are ‘slashed’/’yaoified’. The idea of writing gay fanfic on existing characters is as old as “Sherlock Holmes” (the original Holmes, published in the 1890s), there were already rumors going ‘round as early as the 1920s. So, as much as I think that “Sherlock Holmes” was written as a thinly veiled gay romance by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, do I think that “Hikaru no Go” was by Obata & Hotta, which is to say: not at all.
Not saying that I don’t read either HnG slash nor SH slash; I do and I love it! But I don’t think for a moment either had been intended to be viewed that way and should I ever meet either authors (either in this life or in the hereafter) I shan’t be mentioning that I read the gay fanfic; it just wouldn’t be nice.
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23. Is there a series you’d like to cross Hikaru no Go over with?
Ah well, with my other most favorite fandom: Harry Potter, of course! I was going to write a little drabble here but Ver pretty much covered the more obvious aspects of a HnG/HP crossover, so I’m recommending you go read hers instead. You’ll find it here: http://archiveofourown.org/works/290946 “A Lesson in Wizard's Chess” by Ver (verloren1983).
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