While I was away Double Arts (Jump’s least popular series apparently) got cancelled at chapter 23. As it turned out that last chapter worked fairly well as an ending, but I’m still a tad miffed. Fortunately I had something about Double Arts on the draftboard already, so I guess this is now an epitaph.

Double Arts had a great sympathetic heroine, an intriguing and attractive setting, and an emotionally upfront approach. And it had fight scenes. And training scenes. Yeah sorry, but it’s one of those (again). But wait! There’s more! I’ve decided that I’m going allow myself to dub the series a case of ‘post-cinematic shonen’. And, joy of joys, you’ll get to see how I arrive at that not-very-useful phrase.

In Double Arts we had a female protagonist and a pretty boy hero. Virtually every chapter we were blessed with blushing and shy smiles. It was still a shonen manga – it had an evil organisation with mysterious top-ranking members, legendary martial artists, races of great warriors, combat showdowns, people who wanted to get stronger, and magical special abilities. And it goes without saying that these things could still feel a touch trite. But budding scepticism was allayed by the fact that the generic was embedded in an abnormally interesting world. Where series like Bleachuto attempted to base the power-up battler within colossal fantasy tales, Double Arts went for a more subtle angle.

I’m reminded of a phrase found in another blogger’s tagcloud – “post-shounen” – with its suggestions of informed development for shows still aimed at the same old demographic. The obvious question is how far we’re seeing writers look to establish distance from the formulaic? Double Arts was making a less obviously artificial world for the madness to go down in, searching for proper plotting and purer feeling. I guess such a move must be about overcoming the audience’s predisposition to sneer as the mangaka replays those same old ideas. Soul Eater chose to think up ways to play with the shonen formula, Double Arts chose to redefine more organically. As it turns out Soul Eater has become a (deserved) success, and Double Arts has died young.

So what was different? We can note that it was being narrated from the future by one protagonist, allowing for nifty foreshadowing and tone-setting, and that this simple narrative variation really shows up the series peers for their lack of innovation. It seems natural for these energetic shows to exist in a perpetual present, but that more measured style worked remarkably well and helped make it feel more like a story and less like a franchise – pushing past any cynicism, allowing suspension of disbelief and genuine involvement in the plot.

But the selling point wasn’t ‘now with extra added storytelling nous’, it was ‘now with holding hands’. The gimmick was that the two protagonists held hands all the time. Again, I cannot help but see this in relation to a certain scythelicious anime series based on foot-related-buttock-bruising partnerships. Perhaps progressive shonen means emphasising teamwork in order to overcome the moronic one man army tendency? Is the key to making the “young-boy” genre feel less dumb just recognising other people as more than likeable fellow travellers?

Of course this is not the only route that I’ll accept. Fairy Tail embraces the moron (not such a bad thing, if said moron is smoking hot). It cuts out as much flesh as it can to deliver as many thrills as possible all at once, and it is popular and fun and stuff. It’s the opposite end of the spectrum to Double Arts. Double Arts was still a bunch of badguys and showdowns, only copiously fleshed out. That’s why I’d characterise this manga as innovative in tone above all else.

After getting us used to a disease ravaged world we were thrown into the action with our heroes. They faced a deadly assassin. They ran away. Running away from danger was soon rendered obsolete by a desire to not let others get hurt, which is how they ended up with fighting as a rational course. This less macho approach of resorting to violence was part of that tone, as if the series had been spliced with other more thoughtful genres (or, whisper it, reality). Which is to say that presentational differences are not superficial, they change the emphasis of the story – meaning that a similar message and the odd unoriginal feature can feel much less like same-old-shonen. That where earlier and more successful series just took shonen archetypes and made them ever bigger and slicker, Double Arts altered the feel in a less cinematic way.

What of the shonen mantra, the willing oneself to level up? Surely that limited the ability to have a new tone? How far away are we from the generic when the cast have to assert their capability the same way? We still have that basic power up mechanic, only attached to a different sort of story. What’s worth analysing in more detail is the fights themselves.

I don’t normally annotate pictures, but this frame is just damn cool and if you compare it to the half-arsed early chapters of Claymore, or for that matter the early chapters of virtually fucking anything, you can see why Double Arts had me so firmly on board.

The most obvious feature in the fights is that our two heroes didn’t use weapons and they won by knockout blows not surgical crippling (a la Luffy). Their superpower (saddled with the rather lame name “flare”) was one which functioned exclusively as an aid to teamwork, the outcomes of the fights were simple expressions of willpower. Violence was not glorified, it was a response to the badguys. The powerup ego-trip of the superhard hero was restrained, Double Arts was always about doing the right thing more than raising the power levels or enjoying hitting people.

A major contradiction handled more or less explicitly by Double Arts was between our heroes’ selfless action and their refusal to let their allies sacrifice themselves. They’d put their lives on the line for a cause, but when someone else tried to do the same thing, they wouldn’t just let that be, they’d jump in and add their weight to the struggle, because maybe with a bit more effort they might do the impossible together. They always had some hope left, some reason to carry on. That’s a young persons mindset, and this youthfulness is something shonen can’t and shouldn’t try to escape.

In dealing with self-sacrifice Double Arts focused less on stubborn self-confidence and more on stubborn team-spirit. This gave its variation on the power-up drive a bit of personality. The child’s stubbornness tells you to stand up for others because they always have something of value. What Double Arts was increasingly doing was recasting this idea in the form of a love story. Our heroes fought together because they cared for one another. Cue delicious blushing.

This less grandiose motivation is part of what I mean by post-cinematic shonen. But in a wider sense I think there was a movement from the colossal scale and dramatic po-facedness of the storytelling style of Bleachuto into a more humble and immersive direction. Those series upped the ante, Double Arts refined. The storytelling was organic and produced a more rational fantasy world. It was the tale of an everyman heroine who slowly decided to fight, rather than a celebration of yet another hothead. It was much more like telling a story designed for a young boy, and much less letting him write his own illiterate self-serving fantastic.

Or at least, that was the feel I got from these early stages. It might well have gone absurd later on: Bleach started off as Buffy in a skirt, Naruto never used to blast forests to the ground. Perhaps I’m ignoring the faults of the series in my irritation at its cancellation, and I could certainly be accused of misinterpreting a slow build up for true originality.

But I think the differences in approach went deeper than this, mainly in terms of pacing and characterisation, and were tied to the storytelling. Which is why Double Arts felt like its own entity. It was carving out an identity by fiddling with the style of shonen, and if that’s progress, then this must be post-shonen. Perhaps it was insufficiently radical to be worth terming truly progressive or important, but it was individual, and individuality has been known to kick serious buttocks. Only, as it turns out, what the audience really wanted was cinematic non-stop eye-burning madness. And if that’s what it takes to keep the demographic happy maybe shonen can’t go post-cinematic at all.