100 Things, "Week" 14: Clover
If you missed my video on Clover, it's over here.
Here's hoping that work settles down this week with enough time for me to rest before Confluence (we leave day after tomorrow). Hardware changeovers, potential malware infestations (so far, nothing serious has turned up), an incoming-traffic pattern that looked more like a DDOS attack than anything I ever thought I'd see hitting a tiny, little-known business like ours (I must assume, if that's what it was, that one of our providers was the party actually being attacked, but this did result in all our email bouncing, all weekend). I've been missing so much sleep that I've been ::gasp:: making mistakes! Not that mistakes don't happen to everyone, but I'm starting to revert to that paranoid state I had in high school, where everyone was out to "get me" for ill-defined, mostly nonexistent reasons that caused incessant stomachaches. I've mostly grown out of that, thank goodness, and thanks to therapy and reminders to eat regularly. Not conducive to personableness, communication, or composition of any kind. But I want to write! I need to write this, and then get back on something resembling a schedule tomorrow with my thoughts about Avatar! And then maybe finish one of the stories I'm working on...
100 Things Blogging Challenge, Belated Week 14: Clover, by CLAMP.
Anyone familiar with manga who picks up Clover will see immediately that it's just not typical. Rather than full-page spreads designed to move the eye from one piece of action to the next as if the reader were watching a static film -- with quick changes for quick motion and full-page spreads reading like a camera pausing long enough to see a single manly tear -- this series reads like having a dream. It's a very vaguely flowing series of images, disconnected enough that CLAMP has abandoned the standard 15- to 20-page weekly chapter format. Some chapters are, in fact, no longer than a single page. More often than not, they feature the "camera paused" effect of a single image dominating the page, but here with a smaller image swimming in a sea of white or black. Sometimes, you see no more than a single word or phrase. Time seems just as fluid as a dream. While the first two books, comprising the first arc, do take place in chronological order, the third and fourth books proceed backwards in time to move the story forward, and that story imparts no sense of urgency at all. In place of that "page-turner" feel most stories try for, the reader finds a magnetism that draws you to stare at each page's art and drift in the art's melancholy atmosphere.
The story, as it exists, features 5 central characters: one of them is dead before it begins, one is dead by the end of book two, another is expected to pass on in no more than a year or two, yet one more has a kill-switch planted in his brain, and the last remaining will certainly miss them for the rest of time, should he survive the two unwritten books. All five are characters and active, no matter the state of their mortality. Life and death themselves have no hint of "revolving-door" impermanence, but assume a certain irrelevance due to the rewinding style of storytelling. That last character above is Kazuhiko, the only one who isn't a "Clover" -- one of the children taken for a laboratory study years before to develop psycho-physical powers. The stronger the child's powers, the more leaves on their clover. At the three and four-leaf levels, these children are practically omniscient, hearing every sound in the world's atmosphere, and can manifest powerful technology out of seeming nothingness. Their lives are states of enforced loneliness, as the power they possess makes it too dangerous to allow them to know anyone -- for anyone to give them dreams, or wishes, or to try manipulating them for personal gain. The directorship of the world has no balancing force with which to keep the four-leaf clover in check other than her own emptiness.
Each of them, however, is in their own cage, not just the four-leaf, Suu. Like the sparse, separated layouts of the manga, even the smallest amount of "difference" between the clovers and ordinary humans forces a gap between them and the world. The one-leaf clover -- a singer named Oruha -- has no power except the ability to predict her own death. It's nothing as world-quaking as the ability to know all and hear all, but every day, the knowledge that her end is coming soon makes it a struggle for her to participate in her own life. Despite the four clovers having seemingly been cursed, however, and condemned to lives of bitter solitude, they are all drawn into a fleeting temporal conjunction and a lasting emotional connection by two things: the words of Oruha's songs echoing through the pages, and a man named Kazuhiko who doesn't even know what a Clover is for the majority of the story.
Kazuhiko -- the ordinary man, the friend, the lover -- watches and lives in all their stories with an open and unknowing mind. He is the blank page. One might even say that Clover is his dream. He receives an order to lead a girl he's never met, but who knows more about him and his life than perhaps he does himself, to a location he hasn't been told, for reasons he can't know. He never even asks. He seems content with the mystery. Even when Suu asks him if he wants to know what's going on, he answers that his wanting to know is contingent on her wanting to inform. This character becomes the ultimate null in answer to her and her fellow clovers' overpotent access to knowledge. He follows the girl he's supposed to escort, like a man following a will o'the wisp, through urban landscapes filled with insurgents and organized crime trying to possess the elusive four-leaf. They then arrive at the destination in concert with him arriving at the understanding that this girl was the subject and co-author of his lover, Oruha's, last song, which has been playing throughout the first two books:
a bird in a gilded cage,
a bird bereft of flight,
a bird that cannot cry,
a bird all alone
So take me
I want happiness
Happy just to be with you
Happy just to see your smile
So take me
to a true Elsewhere
The words literally and visually bring the five characters together as a unit. Oruha's songs tell their story, and focus all of their attention, certainly; but perhaps the art style of the manga itself is most defined by the fact that the words are integral to the composition of the images. Most manga arrange speech bubbles in such a way as to be least intrusive, and cleaning out the text has little impact upon the images themselves. Clover, however, seems to focus on the concept that words are art. Lyricism in composition is part of it, but the visual balance of placing the text just so, patterning tableaus of text artifacts as checkerboards that make the speaker clear without "bubbles" to tell us whose speech it is, and the parallelism of construction turn the words of the characters' lines and Oruha's songs into a visual art as well. Perhaps it's simple and unsubtle for me to write it like this (although, as a friend reminded me, Clover is very unsubtle for something that looks so delicate), but the point of these choices in crafting this dream seems to say that people escape loneliness not by knowing "reality" but by exchanging words and sharing experience. These connect people. And despite the unlikelihood that any publisher would finance the last two, unwritten volumes, I have to wonder if Kazuhiko will find a way to be happy again as friends and lovers leave him behind. Or perhaps, as the story unfolds backwards, being the one left behind is a non-issue?
This entry was originally posted at http://psiten.dreamwidth.org/89036.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
Here's hoping that work settles down this week with enough time for me to rest before Confluence (we leave day after tomorrow). Hardware changeovers, potential malware infestations (so far, nothing serious has turned up), an incoming-traffic pattern that looked more like a DDOS attack than anything I ever thought I'd see hitting a tiny, little-known business like ours (I must assume, if that's what it was, that one of our providers was the party actually being attacked, but this did result in all our email bouncing, all weekend). I've been missing so much sleep that I've been ::gasp:: making mistakes! Not that mistakes don't happen to everyone, but I'm starting to revert to that paranoid state I had in high school, where everyone was out to "get me" for ill-defined, mostly nonexistent reasons that caused incessant stomachaches. I've mostly grown out of that, thank goodness, and thanks to therapy and reminders to eat regularly. Not conducive to personableness, communication, or composition of any kind. But I want to write! I need to write this, and then get back on something resembling a schedule tomorrow with my thoughts about Avatar! And then maybe finish one of the stories I'm working on...
100 Things Blogging Challenge, Belated Week 14: Clover, by CLAMP.
Anyone familiar with manga who picks up Clover will see immediately that it's just not typical. Rather than full-page spreads designed to move the eye from one piece of action to the next as if the reader were watching a static film -- with quick changes for quick motion and full-page spreads reading like a camera pausing long enough to see a single manly tear -- this series reads like having a dream. It's a very vaguely flowing series of images, disconnected enough that CLAMP has abandoned the standard 15- to 20-page weekly chapter format. Some chapters are, in fact, no longer than a single page. More often than not, they feature the "camera paused" effect of a single image dominating the page, but here with a smaller image swimming in a sea of white or black. Sometimes, you see no more than a single word or phrase. Time seems just as fluid as a dream. While the first two books, comprising the first arc, do take place in chronological order, the third and fourth books proceed backwards in time to move the story forward, and that story imparts no sense of urgency at all. In place of that "page-turner" feel most stories try for, the reader finds a magnetism that draws you to stare at each page's art and drift in the art's melancholy atmosphere.
The story, as it exists, features 5 central characters: one of them is dead before it begins, one is dead by the end of book two, another is expected to pass on in no more than a year or two, yet one more has a kill-switch planted in his brain, and the last remaining will certainly miss them for the rest of time, should he survive the two unwritten books. All five are characters and active, no matter the state of their mortality. Life and death themselves have no hint of "revolving-door" impermanence, but assume a certain irrelevance due to the rewinding style of storytelling. That last character above is Kazuhiko, the only one who isn't a "Clover" -- one of the children taken for a laboratory study years before to develop psycho-physical powers. The stronger the child's powers, the more leaves on their clover. At the three and four-leaf levels, these children are practically omniscient, hearing every sound in the world's atmosphere, and can manifest powerful technology out of seeming nothingness. Their lives are states of enforced loneliness, as the power they possess makes it too dangerous to allow them to know anyone -- for anyone to give them dreams, or wishes, or to try manipulating them for personal gain. The directorship of the world has no balancing force with which to keep the four-leaf clover in check other than her own emptiness.
Each of them, however, is in their own cage, not just the four-leaf, Suu. Like the sparse, separated layouts of the manga, even the smallest amount of "difference" between the clovers and ordinary humans forces a gap between them and the world. The one-leaf clover -- a singer named Oruha -- has no power except the ability to predict her own death. It's nothing as world-quaking as the ability to know all and hear all, but every day, the knowledge that her end is coming soon makes it a struggle for her to participate in her own life. Despite the four clovers having seemingly been cursed, however, and condemned to lives of bitter solitude, they are all drawn into a fleeting temporal conjunction and a lasting emotional connection by two things: the words of Oruha's songs echoing through the pages, and a man named Kazuhiko who doesn't even know what a Clover is for the majority of the story.
Kazuhiko -- the ordinary man, the friend, the lover -- watches and lives in all their stories with an open and unknowing mind. He is the blank page. One might even say that Clover is his dream. He receives an order to lead a girl he's never met, but who knows more about him and his life than perhaps he does himself, to a location he hasn't been told, for reasons he can't know. He never even asks. He seems content with the mystery. Even when Suu asks him if he wants to know what's going on, he answers that his wanting to know is contingent on her wanting to inform. This character becomes the ultimate null in answer to her and her fellow clovers' overpotent access to knowledge. He follows the girl he's supposed to escort, like a man following a will o'the wisp, through urban landscapes filled with insurgents and organized crime trying to possess the elusive four-leaf. They then arrive at the destination in concert with him arriving at the understanding that this girl was the subject and co-author of his lover, Oruha's, last song, which has been playing throughout the first two books:
a bird in a gilded cage,
a bird bereft of flight,
a bird that cannot cry,
a bird all alone
So take me
I want happiness
Happy just to be with you
Happy just to see your smile
So take me
to a true Elsewhere
The words literally and visually bring the five characters together as a unit. Oruha's songs tell their story, and focus all of their attention, certainly; but perhaps the art style of the manga itself is most defined by the fact that the words are integral to the composition of the images. Most manga arrange speech bubbles in such a way as to be least intrusive, and cleaning out the text has little impact upon the images themselves. Clover, however, seems to focus on the concept that words are art. Lyricism in composition is part of it, but the visual balance of placing the text just so, patterning tableaus of text artifacts as checkerboards that make the speaker clear without "bubbles" to tell us whose speech it is, and the parallelism of construction turn the words of the characters' lines and Oruha's songs into a visual art as well. Perhaps it's simple and unsubtle for me to write it like this (although, as a friend reminded me, Clover is very unsubtle for something that looks so delicate), but the point of these choices in crafting this dream seems to say that people escape loneliness not by knowing "reality" but by exchanging words and sharing experience. These connect people. And despite the unlikelihood that any publisher would finance the last two, unwritten volumes, I have to wonder if Kazuhiko will find a way to be happy again as friends and lovers leave him behind. Or perhaps, as the story unfolds backwards, being the one left behind is a non-issue?
This entry was originally posted at http://psiten.dreamwidth.org/89036.html. Please comment there using OpenID.