I’ll actually make a conscious effort to avoid major and specific plot spoilers here, both because you probably haven’t read IO (literally イオ) and because I want you to. I won’t say I guarantee you’ll like it if you have an interest in harem, or can get past the harem veneer, but it’s worth a look, not least because its harem lead isn’t quite what one would expect.
(P.S. I have been posting here frequently. If for whatever reason this excites you, I’ll warn you not to get your hopes up. Semester two of grad school is just beginning…)
(P.P.S. Though I guess it would be nice if I could pull out 500 words or so at least once a week. We’ll see.)
IO’s tricky when it comes to the harem bit. It’s rather more than harem, but the transition between harem and everything else is remarkably smooth, if indeed the manga transitions from harem; at no point does the harem become invisible, so to speak. Better to say that IO begins predominantly harem-genred, and stacks on a new genre every half-dozen chapters or so, until we end up with a Frankenstein monster composed of slice of life, supernatural mystery, political thriller, family drama, psychological horror, and diving equipment instruction manual, among other things.
The result is that IO is about many things. Ostensibly, though, it’s about this dude.
He being Taiyo Nakahara (or Nakabaru, or something, nobody seems to know for sure), that lecherous high school guy whose exploits form the core of any respectable harem romance. But only at first glance.
He isn’t that lecherous, for one thing. He just has a healthy respect for certain attributes of the sex in which he’s interested. Yeah, he has much to say on the topic of picking up women, but he never really harasses anyone. And, yeah, he’s a fan of porno. But so were you, in high school. Don’t lie to me. At any rate Taiyo isn’t anything like that obnoxious Urusei Yatsura guy, and that makes him alright, as far as I’m concerned.
Even his accidental lechery is remarkably rare — one or two (in)convenient falls, and one or two unintended gropes, as far as I remember. Give or take, anyway; suffice to say that he isn’t as clumsy as, say, Keitaro Urashima. And he’s generally more respectable than Keitaro in that his successes, those incidents of his being a decent human being, tend to be neither accidental nor incidental. He succeeds because he really, genuinely cares about people with a fiery passion. So fiery, in fact, that he’s practically hot-blooded. His great-great-great-grandchildren will be super robot pilots, probably.
Taiyo makes mistakes, of course, usually by being bullheaded or imperceptive; he isn’t likable 100% of the time, and that’s the way it should be. He only truly and profoundly screws up once — but it is one hell of a screwup, it must be said, one with lingering effects, one he can never really make right. But it’s the sort of event that might be interpreted differently by each reader, morally speaking, and, for my part, it didn’t make me hate the guy; it just made him seem all the more human. More than that, it’s a mistake caused in large part by Taiyo’s hotbloodedness and willingness to give so much of himself to those in need. His virtues become flaws — or, rather, they’re revealed as simply traits, personality attributes with positive and negative repercussions.
In short, Taiyo is remarkable because he shows a bit of character. He’s sympathetic well beyond the level of reader-surrogate, even when we don’t necessarily agree with him. I’m not trying to condemn harem protagonists generally here, though perhaps that’s what I’ve done; I’ll try to pull away from that by saying that Taiyo’s development from apparent stereotype into complex entity struck me as notable in any of the contexts IO provides.
(If you do indeed decide to seek out and read IO, you may wish to do so with Baka-Raptor’s harem simultaneity requirement in mind. I didn’t consider it at the time, and I wish I had.)
Fine, am sold.
I’m intrigued by the line that turns behaviors into traits, the way you described it. It’s still kind of fuzzy to me.
I’m not really thinking of behaviors into traits here so much as the idea of a “trait” as something with both good and bad consequences (or something that inspires both “good” and “bad” behaviors). Trait is the slash in the middle of virtue/flaw, as I’ve used it here.
Thanks for this recommendation. My cousin and I ended up reading it and both really enjoyed it. My biggest gripe would be the plot around the whales was too vague, but I think it’s because the author was near to writing themselves into never ending plot holes. The one thing about the series that stood out was how extreme a number of the characters became, both in past and in the present. Mio actually became my favorite character just because of her extreme yet confident moves, but everyone resorted to such terrible or forceful tactics throughout. The parallels between the past and present was eerie, like parent like child, but the ending ended up being about the characters trying to break the cycle started by their parents. All of that together made it a really great read, so thank you.
I’m always happy to point people toward my lesser-known and often bizarre manga finds.
“Extreme” is a good word for the characters. But somehow, even when it’s especially over the top (which I don’t recall being too frequently), the manga convinces you to buy into what it’s doing anyway.
The problem with the whale plot, I think, is that it was a kind of open-ended catchall mystery; it could’ve been used to justify just about anything, if the writer needed it to. I’m actually okay with the general vagueness of it, as the writer wasn’t heavy-handed about using it to explain away every minor complication. But perhaps this turned it into a complication in its own right.
Though it sort of caught me off-guard when the manga canonized the literary reference I’d been making in jest since the whale’s first appearance. Stole my damn joke :p