…when biting the heads off men (well, gingerbread, I mean). Well, I did make this blog to talk about Toriko, so I guess I want to talk about Toriko.

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To put it bluntly, I don’t know why I’m into the Toriko manga. It’s really not my M.O. to like this sort of shonen; Toriko is the manliest manly man comic right now in Shonen Jump.

It has more testosterone than a bull with eight balls. The guys here aren’t the willowy men who unsheathe their sword (or other mystic weapon) dance around in a circle trailing a blizzard of petals, before their enemies fall over as if knocked down by a feather. (Though there’s nothing wrong with that tradition).

Nope. It’s fists and punching and more fists and more punching. Yep. Lots and lots of fists and punching and muscles that are bigger than most people’s heads. Also lots of bursting through shirts. Seriously, since I don’t cook very well, I’d make my living in the gourmet world by manufacturing shirts, because the men in this world seem to burst through an awful large amount of shirts every time they bulge their muscles.

(Oddly enough, they don’t seem to burst through their pants. C’mon guys, work on them leg muscles a bit more why don’t you?!)

At this point, I bet Komatsu has a separate section in his pack just to carry around spare shirts for Toriko, just in case something he cooks has that effect yet again.

I digress. Manly muscle man comics aren’t usually my thing. I respect Dragon Ball for its place in the manga world (and since the mangaka worked on Dragon Ball way back when, you can definitely see the homage it plays to its predecessor) but I never really could get into its storyline. I never light the fighting for fighting sake kind of comics too, that came out of the post-Dragonball era of comics. It just wasn’t my thing.

The other two manga that has a great influence on Toriko are One Piece and to a certain extent, Hunter X Hunter. Mostly, the latter two manga supply the “offbeat world and rules” that Toriko thrives off of. It has the same odd logic of the shonen world; when in doubt, power up or throw in some technical gobbledegook.

-spoiler alert for most recent chapters —

(The most recent egregious example of this is during the gambling arc when Coco and Co (yes, I just wanted to type that) win a card tournament by making sure the order of the food their opponent was eating was stacked in a manner that would kill him. While this was a very awesome idea, the execution left me going “huh” because as a reader, I don’t know what in the heck all these foods do since they’re not based on real life food. Chinese Cheese Cabbage has bacteria?! How should I know that?!

So it was like “you won because the mangaka made stuff up” instead of building things up, step by step, and revealing it slowly to the reader.

Oh well. It’s an accepted tradition in Shonen manga, anyway … so I can’t complain. How many card based anime use the “suddenly, the trump card appears!” 

-End spoiler alert —

It’s a little annoying since I kinda really like a good strategical set up and take down, but given the context of the world, I can live with it. Moreover, winning by food, as I said before, has its elements of awesome.

Toriko has several strengths. One of these is that its world is very unique and I really like good world building. It’s always interesting to see what kind of food related pun will come up next (though the mangaka really owes a debt to his readers for coming up with a lot of his dishes).

It’s canon female characters aren’t there just to be window dressing. A lot of the times, the women in muscly muscle men comics tend to be willowy and screamy and usually useless beyond being bad guy bait. Dragonball did have Bullma, who wasn’t anyone’s screamer, but I’m really glad Toriko takes its pages from One Piece, who I consider to be the gold star standard of how to treat women in a shonen manga.

There aren’t a lot of women in Toriko, and none of them are main characters, but the few we do see are women who are in power and who have power.

None of them are objectified either, as having big boobs  and being lust objects… well, okay, Warden Love is, but the mangaka actually plays with that stereotype instead of indulging in it. 

Warden Love is using her feminine wiles to CONTROL AN ENTIRE PRISON. It goes well with the whole honeycomb idea; she’s the queen bee (she’s even dressed like a little bug) who rules with both her sexual powers … despite being short and looking powerless in appearance. Toriko is great at showing how being short and small does not equal being powerless.

Other than Warden love, the other three main female characters - Rin, Melk II and Setsuno, are nothing like the traditional big breasted bouncy ladies that populate shonen manga (even One Piece fails in this regard). They are shaped like a lot of us girls really are: Rin gets teased for her big hips, Melk … well, until the big reveal, she was coded as a man, and Setsuno is a kickass granny that even the bad guys fear.

That’s refreshing. And yes, there is a tiny bit of irony that in a manly man comic, the most feminine of all the characters is one of the four greatest representatives of the manly man team. Oh Sunny. XD

One of the other things Toriko gets right is Komatsu. It’s not a secret; I’m a big Komatsu fan, mainly because Komatsu’s type of character is rare in the shonen world. On first glance, he’s … not that attractive. Short, with a huge nose and a loud mouth (it’s fine in the manga, but aaack, on the rare occasions I watch the anime, I have to lower the volume), he pretty much cries at every little thing .

So far, he’s been pretty useless at most of the major confrontations with wild beasties.. Komatsu is what would be known as the “chick” in the five man band. (oo! I learned how to link!)  He’s definitely the heart of the other four.

But he doesn’t stand around getting kidnapped. Nope. He’s actually the sane one most of the time and speaks what all of us would be thinking when being confronted with death-by-giant-waterfall. Most people would say he’s the reader’s lens … through his reactions we can see really how awesome the world is.

But … that not quite true. Readers lenses usually means that we think we can be the character.

I don’t think I’ll ever be as awesome as Komatsu. Komatsu has a talent that, in a cooking manga, would give him the title spot; (for instance, he’d do very well in Yakitate Japan!). He may be the chick, but I have a feeling that without him, the team couldn’t go on to get their ultimate goal: finishing their full course menus. They can’t even really evolve without him. (That makes him sound like a Pokemon trainer, doesn’t it?! Gotta Catch ‘em on, Matsu!)

We readers aren’t ever going to be able to pull THAT off. I can barely make mac and cheese, so yeah. Also, I appreciate that unlike most “chick” characters, he genuinely works to further  his talents. It doesn’t come from an inner goodness or innocence or sense of peace — his talent takes friggin hard work (check out the century soup arc, for instance). Yes, he is gifted with the usual “chick” power of being able to “hear” the heart of things (This time, ingredients), but just listening doesn’t do him a darn bit of good. He has to work for his power.

I think that’s what sets him apart from being labeled as just the “chick” of the group. I guess I tend to identify more with characters who work for their breakthroughs, instead of just powering up. He’s a more effective reader stand in because he isn’t so magically pure and innocent and has so much heart that the world conforms to his goodness. That sorta boring, if you ask me (and it’s why I’m not a huge fan of overly shoujo manga either, with its perfect magic girls.)

Komatsu is ugly, loud, has lots of faults … and has to struggle, fail, and overcome it all to reach his full potential. It also helps that he is kind (though he can be very inconsiderate), thoughtful (though in turn, thoughtless beacuse some of the things he says and assumes *facepalm*) and a genius in cooking (but completely an idiot as to knowing HOW his own world works … c’mon, Komatsu, REALLY you didn’t know anything about Gourmet City and its restaurants?! REALLY?!).

It’s this balance that makes him a great character … and perhaps the most well written of all of the others in the manga. The mangaka isn’t scared to let him fail or embarass himself. It’s what saves him from being a Mary Sue chick. Strangely enough, I would even argue that Komatsu’s the main character, not Toriko, because he has the  longest path to follow and will be the one who changes the most.

Toriko himself does have a bit of changing to do (for one thing, he’s beginning to learn that he has limits, that he has to humble himself sometime, and that he really should value his companions a bit more (don’t get me started on how he misinterpreted Yocchi’s statement about forgetting what is important. Toriko immediately said “FOOD”. No, you idiot, Yocchi was regretting not spending more time with his wife!). His life in the moment attitude is going to bite him in the butt, I think.

But yeah. Toriko is a fun romp. It’s a bit fluffy — as much as a manga which uses its fists to make a political point can be fluffy — doesn’t really delve into angst (especially the OH NOES, Captain Horrible mc Horrible pants killed my family! MUST REVENGE! sort of angst that some shonen manga thrive on). It’s a lot of fun. I like it, perhaps, because of this … it gives some variety to my otherwise mundane manga diet.

I’m not going to lie: there are some troubling things about the manga — I really wish they’d do something more with their kickass female characters, I’m somewhat disturbed by the casual treatment of the loss of life, and I’m REALLY disturbed by the animal fighting arena. Dude. Making animals — who don’t have a choice — fight each other — NOT COOL. WHY IS THIS SANCTIONED BY THE GOVERNMENT?! Though I think the mangaka wasn’t condoning this as much as pointing out the IGO has some serious problems, from the slums to the fighting rings. It’s interesting that there’s a human parallel to the animal fighting rings, with the gambling cities. However, I have a harder time feeling sorry for people who willingly bet their lives for food than I do for captured animals.

I wasn’t comfortable with the Sphinx (Despite the Zebra Awesomeness) because really? Do we really have to torture animals just to get something tasty?

Usually, the only reason I can’t blame Toriko for killing to eat is that well, the things he usually hunts want to kill him too (And that’s the only saving grace about the Sphinx … that sucker was POWERFUL). I’m not about to get all PETA about an imaginary world, but it does give pause. I wouldn’t recommend it to my vegan friends, at any rate.

I’m still thinking through my reactions to that. But OMG, this post has gotten huge, so I’m going to stop.

Great googly moogly, did I really have all this pent up Toriko discussion within me?! *facepalm* I guess that’s what happens when no one in my other fandom groups like the manga. iT gets all bottled up until I explode. Heh heh heh. Yes, going to shut up now. Until the next time. Gah.

  1. wonderble posted this