Guilty Pleasures: Griffith

Griffith from Berserk is a great villain. His razor-sharp intelligence, immense ambition, and alluring elegance all pull viewers in and make them want to root for him, to consider Griffith the kind of villain that both dreams and nightmares are made of. All the fanboys who can't take a male villain seriously just because he's pretty, step away. Y' got no power here.

I appreciate him for all that and more. I like the fact that Griffith makes the "beauty is only skin deep" thing work for a male character, which is harder to do these days. In modern times, beautiful men are already perceived as suspect and decadent more often than they are seen as virtuous, but Griffith sells the idea that this double standard doesn't exist. What he is turns out to be is a genuine shock to the characters, who believed in him.

So what's the problem with this amazing villain? The problem is that Griffith committed rape. There's no way around this: Griffith is Femto, and Femto is Griffith, with his rape of Casca and mutilation of Guts a reflection of Griffith's desires. Griffith needed to assert his dominance over Casca and Guts, "punish" them for being "above" him, because he felt he should be the one in charge, and others his servants.

Ultimately, that is what Griffith wants: for others to be below him, and to use them. He could have said no to the Sacrifice, and continued his suicide attempt. The fact that he said yes proves that despite Griffith's charisma, and despite his fear and pain, a demon is always what he was deep down, someone who viewed others as the means to an end.

As I've said before, you can try to boil it down to statistics, to say that Griffith should be condemned more for the loyal men he sentenced to be mutilated and devoured by demons, rather than his rape of a single woman, but this isn't rational. The smaller, personal microcosm of evil is the one that punches you in the gut.

I'm saying these things maybe as a way to come to terms with the fact that even after seeing all this, I still like Griffith as a character, enjoying him as a high-quality villain. Griffith might be the guiltiest of guilty pleasures, an interest that haunts me a little, which proves the power Berserk can have when it's operating at its peak. Berserk isn't so shocking that it's immune to critique, but I admire it for being able to create violent events that would be over-the-top in other hands, and making them powerful and poignant.

Guilty Pleasures: Chobits

I can't make any arguments against the reasons this manga is considered creepy, but they also have almost no effect on my emotional reaction to it.I still like it, god help me.

Chobits is about a honey-eyed, cat-eared girl robot and her quest for love. After a memory loss, she starts out only able to say "Chi", and taken in by a broke-ass young Joe named Hideki Motosuwa, the main character. Chi has a tragic past, a mystery that gradually unfolds, and there is some meditation on the issues raised in a world when robots like her (actually nearly-human computers called "persocoms") can mimic humans so thoroughly. Hideki and Chi eventually fall in love, transcending all obstacles.

Yet let's get real: it's wish fulfilment. Though Chobits was made by women, Chi is also spank fodder, portrayed with a disturbing combination of innocence and sexual suggestion. Hideki initially has to take a paternal role to teach her memory-wiped self, and because he eventually falls in love with her, it's two times the creepy. Furthermore, though Chi has an inner life of her own, it's mostly brooding about her feelings for Hideki.

To underline the set-up, while male persocoms do exist and have adoring women on their arms, any "futuristic" couple in the named cast involves a female persocom and a male human, paving the way for Hideki and Chi. The "just for men" angle, though thankfully only implied, makes it even harder not to find the story unsettling.

And Chi, as it turns out, can't have sexual intercourse without being re-set, because her re-set button was deliberately put in her no-no place as a way to "test" how deeply a future lover could care for her. Hideki, despite his huge collection of porn and comical horniness, agrees to the condition and lives happily ever after with her.

When I was younger, I found the final reveal subversive and touching, since Hideki, though good-hearted, assumed Chi would perform sexual services when he first found her, and this was dialing back the wish fulfillment. Now it comes off as weird virginity/abstinence fetishism, as if a love can only be "pure" without sex.

However, the illusion of poignancy and substance is impossible to shake entirely, and on some levels I still believe in it, that Chobits is merely a heartfelt sci-fi love story with elements of a mystery, weirdly charming.

There's also the balls-to-the-wall assertion made at the end: even though no persocom has anything but programmed emotions, it doesn't matter as long as humans feel attached to them, and persocoms feel attached in turn. Somehow, Hideki can say "Chi's heart is real; it beats inside of me" and I'll want to believe it, despite the lack of substance in their relationship. That's such determined advocacy for simply wishing things to be right, it's almost admirable.

In the series, some female characters relate their bad experiences with persocoms, involving abandonment and jealousy, but this never creates any long-term consequences for the cast. This social analysis is eventually swept under the rug in favour of straightforwardly pursuing Chi and Hideki's romance.

Stories should not lecture to the audience, of course, nor need be politically correct to be good, but it's easy to see this dropping of conflict as a way for the story to create the illusion of deep consideration without confronting the issues it raises. If a moral conflict is introduced, a story should pursue it to the end, or at least explain why the conflict does not apply to the leads. Maybe the message is supposed to be that others' bad experiences can't spoil a valid concept?

The last part of the manga runs on this same kind of strong individualism, as promoting the complexity of love's form replaces the exploration of the dark side of persocom existence. Oh, and there's also a lot of creepy incest overtones, though none involve literal blood relations.

I've seen several people explain why Chobits is a cut above other male-fantasy manga, and maybe it is (I wouldn't know). The anime version is also worse, dragging out the sex comedy parts with filler before it reaches the heart of the story, and having a less coherent ending. Yet even with this in mind, Chobits is still shaped like itself. No amount of aborted conflict or earnest emotion can disguise the creepiness. At the same time, I can't let go of it. I let myself get bamboozled every time I read the series.

Yumi Tamura's Basara

If this manga could be described in one sentence, it would be "heroic fantasy as seen through a feminine lens". The structure of Basara is a familiar one: a hero rises from humble circumstances to change a world that is under the thrall of an evil king. Yet this version is also heavily inundated with romance (by both the classical and modern definition) and melodrama. Many tears are shed on all sides and by both genders, and the central conceit is that the heroine and hero are actually on opposite sides of a war…but they don't realize it when they fall in love.

Technically Basara is science fiction, as it takes place in a post-apocalyptic Japan that has become in large part a desert. But to the initial eye, these characters seem to come from the distant past, with robes and swords and ancient-looking villages. The exact nature of the disaster is never explained, with the present-day story being far more important.

Japan is under the rule of King Ukon, who has divided his territory among his chidren: the Black, White, Red, and Blue Kings. In a small desert village, a pair of boy and girl twins have been born, and one is prophesied to be the "child of destiny" that will save Japan. Everyone assumes it is the boy, Tatara, and he is celebrated while his sister Sarasa grows up in his shadow.

However, when a raid by the Red King's army leads to Tatara's death, Sarasa disguises herself as her brother, and sets out to gather allies, overthrow the dynasty, and bring peace to Japan. Sometimes she  goes to bathe undisguised at the nearest hot spring, and there she meets a handsome boy named Shuri. They fall in love, meeting at hotsprings and communicating long distance. However, neither realizes they are Tatara and the Red King, sworn enemies.

Basara  is an epic in the truest sense. Unlike some other long manga series, each volume, except for the last two, feels like a single novel split into multiple parts, with the story gathering momentum through each book, and the scope of the world gradually revealed. No space feels wasted, and more importantly, though it is wide in scope with a large cast, Basara remains focused on the emotion and characterization, which makes the larger plot compelling.

Also like most good stories, Basara does not proceed in a straight line to the ending its characters anticipate. Shuri and Sarasa discover the truth in the middle of the story, and King Ukon is not what they would expect when the audience finally meets him.

The girl-disguised-as-a-boy is a classic trope, and thankfully Basara doesn't keep it a secret from her allies until the very end. Sarasa is a compelling heroine, one of those who is obviously destined to win, but shows enough weakness and indecision that they are "human" while still obviously a hero. Sometimes the emotions involved may seem a bit over the top, but that is the nature of this genre of manga. Shuri is also a worthy match, fierce in battle but easygoing out of it, and able to question himself and his role. Both of their characters change and develop over time, and other cast members also change.

And, if you're searching for progressive ideals in fiction, one could do much worse than Basara. It's the sort of story where some concession is made towards a realistic depiction of the status of women in a "medieval" country, but female characters are given plenty of opportunities to shine in both feminine and masculine roles. The story also doesn't suggest that Sarasa secretly pines to return to her "proper" role as a girl. Any moments where she wishes to "just be a girl" are attributed to normal stress, and are about her young age more than her gender.

The art is shojo art, consistent with its manga genre. The young adult characters are often lean and androgynous, with similar bodies once the hair, skin tone, and clothing are taken out of account. However, Tamura can also draw characters of other body types and ages. "Cute" characters such as babies and Sarasa's pet owlet Shinbashi are drawn in a cartoony, scribbled style, which creates an inconsistency. Backgrounds are often amorphous and can make it difficult to see what is going on in the worst cases. However, the costume designs are great, and the art isn't actually bad, it's just a style that may be difficult to get used to, since by 2012, it might be considered "old-school".

The actual story ends at volume 25, while the material continues to volume 27. These last two volumes are a disappointment: Tamura's short comic strips about her characters are fun, but the rest of it, the series of short stories, add things we don't need to see or don't want to see. There are revelations and sequel content that are too cheesy, or too unnecessarily bleak. They can't bring down the rest of the series, but they are disappointing volumes.

Basara is neither a story about the large conflict or the small conflict. Both blend together, both are important, and this gives the series a richer feel than it otherwise would have. It is a crying shame that this series is currently out of print, with volumes 18-20 suffering from enormous price inflations on the secondary market.

The Night of Falling Stars

The American release of Saint Seiya never made that much of a splash, but I managed to get into it, becoming one of the few North American Saint Seiya newbies, even rarer because I preferred the manga. When I subject these feelings to intellectual analysis I don't have a lot to say about Saint Seiya that is good, but it sucks me in time and time again.

It started with a heavily cut dub of the original anime, retitled Knights of the Zodiac. Heavily-edited TV anime are usually hideous, but I still use them as a litmus test for my interest in the original property. Regardless of fandom hyperbole, something of the original property survives in such programming; though Knights of the Zodiac was as terrible as you would expect, something in it drew me towards Saint Seiya.

After this, I picked up the first volume of the manga on impulse, released by Viz Media. It was produced under the dub’s title, but the original title was placed at the top of the logo in smaller font, and the gore of the first volume made it abundantly clear that it was almost unedited, except for changing a few names to match the early dubbed episodes. These were hurdles I was willing to leap over, given that I almost always prefer the original manga to its anime adaptation. The title wasn’t a big issue because the releases of Saint Seiya in other countries were often called Knights of the Zodiac, too.

The Saint Seiya manga was not as visually appealing as the anime, but over time and with some mild exposure to the unedited anime (with one legitimate uncut disc and assorted clips on YouTube), I grew to prefer the manga because of its more streamlined plot and its more appealing characterizations. Choosing the manga also served me well when ADV films discontinued the production of uncut Saint Seiya DVDs, while Viz’s manga release finished.

Saint Seiya began in 1986 as a manga written and drawn by Masami Kurumada. Its era is unclear, but it takes place in an alternate modern day in which Greek gods are sometimes incarnated as humans. Several gods are served by armoured warriors, but of chief concern are the Saints of Athena, youths who wear armour called “Cloths”, based on the constellations and divided into ranks of Bronze, Silver, and Gold. The story centres around five Bronze Saints  (Pegasus Seiya, Andromeda Shun, Dragon Shiryu, Cygnus Hyouga, and Phoenix Ikki), who must stand beside Athena, incarnated as the young girl Saori Kido. The first arc involves infighting among the Saints of Athena, while in the next two manga arcs, they face incarnations of Poseidon and Hades. The anime contains several films and another TV storyline, featuring yet more mythological characters, as well as other classes of Saints and warriors.

It’s much easier to talk about the reasons that I don’t like Saint Seiya than that I do. Like a few other works that I follow, there’s nothing about the larger plot or themes that attracts me, but instead I remain due to an attachment to a select few characters and some superficial aspects, which are enough to carry me through long stretches of boredom.

While I am still hard on the character art for the manga (including its recycled poses and limited number of faces), the design of the armour for any faction can get spectacular. The early Bronze Cloths (and all the female Cloths, which I get to below) are simplistic and scanty, but their complexity and quality of design grows as the story continues. As an additional bonus, Kurumada has planned out how all of these panoplies separate into pieces and are stored as a representation of their constellation, though some unspoken growing and shrinking is required to make this work.

In addition, it may just be my hormones talking. I love the idea of handsome and beautiful men kicking ass, and while the manga art may not be as attractive as the anime redesigns, the intended appearance of the characters is still somewhat obvious. There are plenty of secondary and cannon-fodder Saints have the kind of droopy-eyed, sagging faces common to comical male characters of that period, but they can’t change this.

I’ve already documented my love for Andromeda Shun, and stand by my ill-researched opinion that he’s a stronger character in the manga than in the anime, though still prone to activities which could make him a mimetic wimp. Among my other favourite Saints are Eagle (Aquila) Marin and Dragon (Draco) Shiryu.

Marin has had my attention from the first volume of the manga, which showed her as a far more ruthless and blunt teacher than I ever remembered from Knights of the Zodiac, and excitingly so; she may be a bitch, but she is always a bitch with a purpose. She can also rescue herself, and defy authority for a greater good. However, Marin is hampered by a character design that is as compelling as a train wreck, sporting an incomplete-looking Cloth over what looks like an eighties exercise outfit, but still she has a strong presence.

Like Shun, Marin seems to have been downgraded into the anime, with alterations and extra scenes which make her into a much weaker character in terms of attitude and constitution, so that she doesn’t rescue herself, and is often shown defeated or in peril.

As time goes on, I also realize how shallow my attachment to Dragon Shiryu is compared to the other two characters. I mostly like him because he’s handsome and controlled and has done a few really cool things, but his appeal doesn’t cut quite as deep as Shun and Marin’s does. A panel in the manga in which he says that he doesn’t intend to let Shun wear a Cloth after their current battle also eroded my interest in Shiryu. Shun is a reluctant fighter, but Shiryu’s line is horribly condescending.

None of these three are particularly deep characters, and beyond these reasons it is far easier to talk about the reasons that I don’t like Saint Seiya. Firstly, I don’t consider Saint Seiya to be a welcome antidote to modern cynicism and complexity, or to a lack of “manliness” in the current world. I prefer the attitudes of modern times, and the simplistic forms and roles of Saint Seiya are what make my interest in it surprising.

However, my interest in Saint Seiya is also not an excitedly ironic one, where I point and laugh at how gloriously over-the-top it is. What I like, I enjoy earnestly, and what I dislike, I dislike with the same amount of conviction. For some reason, I don’t have the urge to laugh too hard at the world, even though it’s often very silly.

While there are works that are morally simplistic but manage to have an air of power and sophistication, that is not what Saint Seiya feels like. It feels like it could be better than it is, with so many missed opportunities for character development, moral complexity, and status quo shakeups. Both of these things do happen, but their impact is small. Some characters will even disappear from the plot with no explanation, even those with significant ties to the main characters.

Of the three main arcs, I prefer the first, the Sanctuary arc, which involved infighting among the Saints of Athena and a gradual, if basic mystery. It’s still clear who the heroes are in that scenario, but it’s more interesting than the next two arcs, which involve fighting more incarnated Greek gods and their Saint analogues instead.

I am a fan of Greek mythology and of the goddess Athena, especially. That is part of the draw for Saint Seiya, but also part of my dislike of it. The largest shortcoming in this area is the representation of Athena as incarnated in Saori Kido.

There seem to have been arguments about this in the past, but my bottom line is that Saori is not the kind of female character who plays the war game in a “feminine” way and manages to be just as strong as the fighters. Instead, for the first two manga arcs, she is incapacitated and her rescue is the main driving force. There are a few flashes that indicate she stores a great power that she never uses, but there is almost is no sense of mythic majesty, of godly gravitas to Saori, and it remains hard to accept her as representing one of my all-time favourite mythological figures.

These conditions do improve in the final arc of the manga, and in the belated sequel series The Next Dimension. In these stories, Saori does undertake some more active planning and show a wider range of emotions—before The Next Dimension reverted to an infant state, thus taking one huge leap backwards.

Of the rest of the major female cast, most are tertiary, but those that receive some characterization grate on me. Ophiuchus Shaina changes from hating Seiya to loving him for no apparent reason, and does stupid things like running to confront Poseidon herself, confident he hasn’t awakened to his godly power despite all evidence. Her character design is also a virtual copy of Marin’s, for no apparent reason.

Shunrei and Chameleon Juné, Shiryu and Shun’s possible love interests, were those female characters who scream at the male characters to stop doing courageous things and furthering the plot, because they might get hurt. Such characters are portrayed as screaming hysterics who just don’t “get it”, and if their wishes were obeyed, there would be no story. And again, their angle is never developed—Juné in fact disappears altogether. Despite this, I ship Shun and Juné like crazy.

Female Saints are also cursed with terrible armour and clothing design, with Shaina and Marin sporting but asymmetrical metal bikinis with knee guards and one gauntlet, and Juné as a metallic dominatrix. They also wear different clothing under their Cloths than the male characters do: instead of their simple sleeveless leotards, female Saints have a hodgepodge of stockings, leg warmers, one-piece swimsuits, or thigh-high boots. In short, they seem to come from a completely different design sensibility than the male characters. Other female warriors in different incarnations of Saint Seiya can be better or worse with this, but female Saints are the earliest introduced and most prominent, and thus are hard to ignore.

This different armour style is also in spite of a plot point that female Saints symbolically “hide” their femininity behind masks, which doesn’t mean a whole hell of a lot when they’re dressed in sexy metal armour. I like Marin, but it would take so little effort to make her Cloth and outfit not look like crap.

Furthermore, female Saints have a bizarre rule about not letting a man see behind their masks or they must either kill him or fall in love with him, a scenario driven by questionable logistics and thin explanations. Do they have to retire from Sainthood? What happens if multiple people see them unmasked? Why deprive Athena of warriors based on an arbitrary rule? This is especially important when Shaina loses her mask at least once an arc and never has anything happen to her after the first time, which results in confessing her love for Seiya, though they never get together.

Back to The Next Dimension, I was initially reluctant to read it, being that I felt I had exhausted my interest in Saint Seiya. Three arcs of the same basic formula seemed like enough for me, and I was so zoned out I didn’t realize that the conclusion of Saint Seiya had left the title character at death’s door without a resolution.

However, Shun being a main character in The Next Dimension eventually got to me and I started to read the fan translations. There was a bit of the change in the status quo, but it is largely the same type of series, and this is not helped by a time travel plot in which there just happen to be past characters that look and act like present characters. Despite that laziness, I would still keep reading The Next Dimension.

Of course, if you want to be technical the manga world of Saint Seiya doesn’t just incorporate the three arcs and The Next Dimension. There have been a number of sequels, prequels, and alternate universes by different authors and artists, not considered canon to the original manga. Sometimes I like works like this, but when my interest in Saint Seiya is as narrow and dull as it is, I don’t feel any need to seek out these additional stories.

It is likely because of this disinterest that I don't share a lot of fandom’s fascination with the Gold Saints, the twelve most powerful Saints, whose Cloths represent the western Zodiac. They have definite personalities and important roles in the manga, but apparently, the additional manga delve more deeply into the Gold Saints, upping their fandom popularity.

Of course, one can’t talk about Saint Seiya without mentioning the prominent slash/yaoi fan culture that has sprung up around it. The largely male cast, their attractiveness, and perhaps even issues with the female characters and maybe-love interests, are the likely reasons for this, but I’ve always remained detached from that side of female fandom. I don’t hate the idea of these fan-made couples, and like the idea of porn by female nerds, for female nerds, but such pairings have never turned my crank. I just can’t look at any of the male Saint Seiya characters and get interested in their potential pairings with each other. For example, Hyoga x Shun is a popular pairing, and I can see where they get the idea, but it`s not canonical or inevitable, and I am just not feeling it.

Overall, my relationship with Saint Seiya is a love-hate relationship. My attachment to Shun and Marin, and to a lesser extent Shiryu, is definite. I love the armour designs and the battles when I am emotionally invested in them.  Yet the story often feels hollow, and with a host of minor, gnawing issues that further bring it down.

The Peculiar Olympians: Sir Integral “Integra” Fairboork Wingates Hellsing

“The Peculiar Olympians” is a series of blog posts about my most favourite fictional characters. They are each here for some combination of sympathy, empathy, inspiration, humour, quality, staying power, and/or significance to my relationship with fandom. These are not all the characters that I like, but they are the ones that have stood out to me the most. The list is also alphabetical and nothing more.

It’s another conundrum: how do you stretch “She’s awesome” and “this is another cliché” into a full blog entry? Unlike many characters on this list, my interest in Sir Integral Hellsing was sharp and immediate, and there is little about my feelings towards Integral that really sticks out among her legions of fans.

Descended from supernatural expert Abraham Van Helsing, Sir Integral Hellsing carries on the family tradition of heading the Hellsing Organisation, a group dedicated to the destruction of England's supernatural enemies. She inherited the mantle at age twelve, having to thwart an assassination attempt by her usurper uncle by finding underground the "fruits of the Hellsing family's labours", the vampire Alucard (spell the name backwards). Sir Integral Hellsing will stop at nothing to achieve her goals.

In Integra I could see the things I understood, such as female-centred androgyny (which means having a definite and matching physical and psychological gender but not bound by the old rules of how one of said gender should act), glasses, and deskwork. In addition, I saw what people universally covet in our heroes: emotional strength and control, steely nerves. There is something about a stoic female character, standing tall and serene, eternally ready, which I admire intensely.

Granted, Sir Integra is religious and patriotic while I am neither of these things, and as the manga progresses she engages in increasingly vicious behaviours in the name of her duties. Yet because Integra doesn't exist, there's no moral objection to admiring a character that isn't entirely clean or would likely disagree with me on certain matters. Besides, good heroes should have flaws, even if they are flaws that make the character actually "bad" on some levels instead of simply making them more approachable or giving them dilemmas to solve.

I first encountered Integra through the TV anime adaptation of Hellsing, which was one of those works that seems great until you review it more deeply and then make the inevitable comparisons with the original manga. My interest in the Gonzo-produced anime has been eroded down to a persistent nub, but this is still where I discovered Integra. She’s not that different in the manga but a secret part of me is still drawn to the Gonzo anime’s slightly more cool-headed and stoic characterization of Integra, at least in the early parts, before she is a cripple for the remainder of the show. And then there’s that snazzy green suit/blue ascot combo which is still striking to the eye. All of this lingers pleasantly in my memory even though I am a Hellsing manga die-hard.

The Peculiar Olympians: Andromeda Shun

 “The Peculiar Olympians” is a series of blog posts about my most favourite fictional characters. They are each here for some combination of sympathy, empathy, inspiration, humour, quality, staying power, and/or significance to my relationship with fandom. These are not all the characters that I like, but they are the ones that have stood out to me the most. The list is also alphabetical and nothing more.

For a long time now, I’ve been fond of the anime character design known as the bishounen (“beautiful boy”). There is no overall bishounen character type to go along with this appearance, but at best, perhaps by accident, certain bishounen characters show that male characters can be strong without being traditionally “manly”. It’s one of the few things I’ll still admit that anime and manga has over western works.

If my list of favourite fictional characters is meant to represent aspects of my fandom experience, then a bishounen character was a must for it. I decided easily on Andromeda Shun, from the manga Saint Seiya (know in various countries as Knights of the Zodiac). The character and premise goes a little something like this:

Since the days of myth the Greek goddess Athena has been surrounded by warriors who defended her and upheld the cause of justice in her name. Called "Saints”, they all wear Cloths, supernatural suits of armour that form a figure representing a constellation when at rest. There is a Saint for each constellation, and they are ranked Bronze, Silver, or Gold, as well as other side variants depending on whether it’s the manga or anime.

The continuing incarnation of Athena in mortal flesh ensures that Saints exist clandestinely in the modern day. The Bronze Saint Andromeda Shun is one of these modern Saints, an orphan who trained at the Grande Foundation with ninety-nine other potential Saints who would be sent off to remote locations for further instruction from a new teacher.

Shun's destination was Andromeda Island, a place of extreme temperatures off the coast of Ethiopia. Shun was trained by Silver Saint Cepheus Didaros. Shun's older brother became Bronze Saint Phoenix Ikki.
I didn’t choose Shun to represent my interest in bishounen characters primarily for his looks, as in the manga he’s drawn flatly, and in the anime his initial colour scheme is a clashing mess of green and pink--though in both cases he’s not exactly hard on the eyes. But it’s more because Shun represents the apex of “not manly, but strong”.

In my opinion, the most inspiring heroes are those who have to overcome something within themselves, in addition to their external foes. It’s a tricky thing to make a character’s pain convincing but not grating enough, so that the audience will not be inclined to wait for his rebirth, but Shun achieves it. For those not wiling to dismiss him, he proves to be very heroic. Even though he does not like to fight, he will stand and survive and make sure that others do the same.

However, the idea that Shun always needs Ikki to save him has become a meme of sorts in the series’ tiny English-speaking fandom. In reading the manga myself, I have not seen Shun save Ikki enough times for it to be approach meme status. I don’t know if my reading the manga instead of watching the anime makes a difference, but I just want to be clear that it’s manga-Shun that I base my study on, and that in that case, he very much holds his own.