What gets me about the character designs in RK is that it's set in a historical period and not fantasy at all, and you have the protagonists, or reasonably normal shapes and sizes, and then you have people with these incredibly bizarre appearances who are out of scale with everyone else and everyone treats them absolutely normally. I'm just reading volume 18* now, and a Bizarre Probably Antagonist walks into the inn-place where they're eating, and I'm so used to bizarre people being part of the world** that when the waitress says he's badly scarred, it takes me by surprise.
At any rate, it works so much better in Bleach because they're not from this world, and the story isn't meant to be historical fiction. If only Kubo Tite had Masashi Kishimoto's talent at making the characters' personalities more memorable...
* Read scanlations to somewhere in the beginning of the Kyoto arc, when it got licensed and got yanked off the net, then watched all the anime, and now that the entire series is out over here, I've been whimpering at the thought of how much money it's going to cost to collect them all. And then I had the brilliant idea - well, I'm rather dreading the Kyoto arc again, so why don't I just start with the book right after it ends? I am rather embarrassed at how long it took me to think of this solution.
** Yet somehow the bizarre people are almost always antagonists. You'd think they'd start showing some prejudice against bizarre-looking people by now.
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Tue, Jul. 4th, 2006 04:18 am (UTC)At any rate, it works so much better in Bleach because they're not from this world, and the story isn't meant to be historical fiction. If only Kubo Tite had Masashi Kishimoto's talent at making the characters' personalities more memorable...
* Read scanlations to somewhere in the beginning of the Kyoto arc, when it got licensed and got yanked off the net, then watched all the anime, and now that the entire series is out over here, I've been whimpering at the thought of how much money it's going to cost to collect them all. And then I had the brilliant idea - well, I'm rather dreading the Kyoto arc again, so why don't I just start with the book right after it ends? I am rather embarrassed at how long it took me to think of this solution.
** Yet somehow the bizarre people are almost always antagonists. You'd think they'd start showing some prejudice against bizarre-looking people by now.