Saiyuki Gunlock and Hazel

[louiselux]

Writing this is EXACTLY what I should not be doing. I should be working, should be digging around in journals etc and compiling lists of stuff, but I'm not. I'm refreshing lj every 10 minutes and thinking about writing fic and generally being harebrained because there's no one to tell me to get on with it. This is what happens when I'm left to organise my own time. And I still don't truly understand what affordances are but I've decide to shelve that for the moment.

The end of Saiyuki Gunlock is quite odd, although not that bizarre for an anime. It feels like the animators got desperate and lost their heads and wah! The End. It made me laugh and laugh, again. I'm very glad that Minekura has been quoted as saying that the manga will not follow the same story line as the anime, because the anime ending is just a bit silly. Having Hazel as a youkai is a nice plot twist but it really shows a lack of imagination to have him actually be an evil growling baddie-- as we're shown time and again being a youkai doesn't mean you're evil. So what's the point of ditching all that just for the sake of a rather poorly thought out fight? And why would Gojyo forget that Gato has two guns, when he's been carrying TWO guns for the entire time he's been in the series. It's the little things that niggle. It could have been so much better, and without the giant arm made of stomachs or testicles or whatever they were.

Personally, I think Hazel has to die. Well, to be honest I'd like him to die, mainly because his disruptive presence is really too much to take for very long. One of things I like about Hazel is that he's clearly obsessed with Sanzo no, is that his arrival tips the balance that you feel the ikkou have been striving very hard to maintain. In the Reload manga there's a real sense of exhaustion about them and a sense of them going through the motions and that feeling comes across quite nicely into the anime too. Then Hazel appears and he's one more thing that wants to kill them (apart from Sanzo, as far as we know). Not only does he want to kill them, he becomes part of their everyday lives.

One of the things I've always liked about Saiyuki is the domesticity and repetition of their lives on the road. Eating, sleeping, shopping, driving-- these are the things we see them do in contrast to the fighting and sometimes the fighting seems the minor issue. My point is that Hazel has invaded this domestic routine in a way that no one else has. He's invasive and disruptive to the fragile balance that holds them together.

Comments

[louiselux.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's exactly what he does. A unhealthy obession, if you ask me and doomed to failure;-) Sanzo is one of those people who, the more you try and get closer to, the farther away he moves.