Che mi manga?

Manga.

Mi manga: un po' di festa, un po' di intimità.

Tuttavia, quando stava per essermi data la possibilità to satisfy my needs, here it comes - the manga called DeathNote.

A friend made reference to it over a chat: I have had sporadic episodes of you-tube addiction in the past, in a period in which I felt lonely and out of place and I used to watch and watch little sketches and comedies at youtube (Monthy Python, the Italian Luciana Littizzetto in Chetempochefa, Paolino Ruffini from Livorno) until 1am to turn my brain off - but not much more. I hate computers.

To keep it short, I watched 14 episodes of this stuff in a row, for a total of 5 hours withoit drinking or moving from my chair. It was terrible. Note that each episode last more or less 20 min and I had to confirm my interest in the manga-cartoon every half-episode, by clicking on the relevant YouTube link. And it's not finished. Yesterday, Friday 20th, I still sat down albeit very sleepy and watched the following 9.10 episodes until 2:30 am. Auch! And what is terribly different from the other hypnotic sessions - is that I do not regret.

The morning after, I feel OK, and even willing to see more in the evening. This never happens to me, as on the contrary, when I let myself being turned away by these kind of distractions, afterwards I feel bad, guilty, ashamed, as I just had a momnent of madness, a Geistige Umnachtung. But this time, not at all.

I therefore concluded that there must be something in the manga - or in this particular manga, which is the only one I have seen so far, winning a very negative bias about japanese cartoons - which let it achieve this results, something more than just me being prone to video addiction.

I tried to figure it out, even if it is difficult to force a reluctant mind into thinking, especially if the object of thought is something about which our mind is definitely not cool.Here my results.

This is what stands behind DeathNote:

• symbols which are deeply deep-rooted in our brains. It is curious to see that many of them come from Christianity (the red apple, the to-be innocent victim which rinses the feet of the betrayer, ep. 25 more or less) and from Western literature (Misa seems Lolita, the idea of sacrifice for romantic love, eg the [Sirenetta], or Flying Dutch, or Romeo and Juliet).

• reference to [Japanese] traditional conceptions, as that the written character stand in fact for their object, in such a way that the object is all caught in the characters (this is why is it possible, even of for a god only, to see the name of a person just looking in it face - or soul)

• all this treated in a somehow childish format (the form of a cartoon), which recalls infancy, therefore takes an innocent attitude and disposes us to lower the guard and to let the symbolic messages penetrate deeper into the brain

• a touch of exotism, for the European viewer, which makes it more like a fairy tale, combining with the childish format and reinforcing its effect

• tragic features, I mean, love and death, the proof, the Greek ATH, dilemmas: ti drasw?

This entry is a stub(born). If you are an addict and you wish to add things you noticed about manga, please contact the author or leave a kind comment here below. THank you, Thinking Head!