Kataphrut wrote: Thu Sep 02, 2021 8:37 pm
See, with this post you're falling into the trap a few people in this thread have made of dismissing one medium as lesser because you don't see the people involved with creating it as legitimate authours or passionate creators. The weekly script writers weren't "passionate about the material". They didn't care about it. And I suppose the manga authour was chiseling the panels onto stone tablets off nothing more than the sweat of his own back. Of course not!
That would make the tracing very difficult...
It's either you're into the flawed modern auteur theory narrative (the authour is god, the studio is out to profit off their work, and everyone else is just there to realise the authour's vision), or you're a medium snob. But the fact is, all art, particularly commercial art like Dragon Ball is collaborative. And within those collaborations lie plenty of passionate people. You only have to look at the comments made by Nagamine about the Broly movie, Nakamura about the ToP arc, Ishitani about episode 131 or the work animators like Tate and Takahashi put into it to see that.
I am a medium snob, but my intent wasn’t to dismiss the efforts of any of the creators who worked—often against the odds—on the TV version of
Super, nor to imply that none had genuine passion for the material. (At the same time, I think it’s hard to claim that all of them did, which is also no knock against them as people or creatives—it was a job.) That post was a bit of hyperbole responding to hyperbole. I do think it’s worth bringing up that the production environment of the series likely prevented them from doing their best work, which is relevant solely when it comes to addressing the attitudes I’ll get at below. It’s obvious—particularly in the Universal Survival arc—that as much as the series improved, it also never reached a point where it really felt like the right hand knew what the left was doing, writing-wise. Not the fault of the individual script-writers and likely not even the fault of the show-runners (possibly the fault of the suits who rushed into the production initially). I never touched on the animators or directors, whose work is independent of (to a certain extent, while of course being the expressive vehicle for) the writing and scripting, which I think is mostly what’s being addressed in fan attitudes like the one I was responding to.
But no, what I really meant that reply to quip at wasn’t the validity of the work by those creatives, but the fan attitudes that somehow take the opposite of that auteur fallacy, especially when it comes to sequel work—that the work of a studio or team, even ones working in horribly unfavorable environments for the final product, as with
Super, must be the more legitimate/official/authoritative/what-have-you option or version, whereas the work of individual authors, or those with fan backgrounds, cannot be. At the logical end of which is the (I think very strange) assumption that prior investment in or passion toward the subject is a demerit, whereas a lack of it is somehow legitimizing. Or that singular authorship is delegitimizing in comparison, in a medium and in a sequel to a series founded on it.
I don’t take any issue with those who prefer the anime for whatever reason—it certainly has its appeals in ways the manga lacks, and vice versa. And I do not actually support questioning the creative talent or passion of any specific script-writers on an individual basis—they did not become script-writers because they hate fiction—however hamstrung the collective final product of
Super was. But I will never miss an opportunity to quip back a bit at the specific kind of manga missives that are the “just a fanartist” comments to try to dismiss it in comparison, as the assumptions behind it are just too strange to not delve into. There are ways and reasons to offer critique of the manga or praise of the anime that aren’t quite so problematic in what they say about who the creators of derivative fiction should or should not be.
Suffice it to say, I think dismissing either the legitimacy of the studio-team approach or singular (even? especially?) former-fan-author one outright is problematic. At the end of the day, these are all creatives looking to do their best work and do right by the series—and they deserve the benefit of good-faith appraisal. But guess how many times the fandom presents the opportunity to point out the issues with the latter as opposed to the former.
EDIT— Also what Mike said. We’re kind of off the road from the original topic now, but I do think these are discussions worth having, to the extent that any discussions about sequel series for fantasy martial-arts comics are worth having (which is as much as they are for any other type of fiction—very).
EDIT EDIT— To further assure you of the intended hyperbole-as-response of that post, you can catch me just a page or so back in this thread noting that elements of Toyotaro’s manga are almost certainly responding to the anime having already aired, so it’s not like it existed in some creative vacuum, even though I think it reads fine independently, and on a recent Kanzenshuu podcast going through the different behind-the-scenes hints as to
Super’s creative development in both mediums to note that it’s never been a clear-cut singular voice from the start—nor was even the original manga. I just meant to respond to one (frequently seen) kind of dismissal with its hyperbolic opposite. Both kinds of dismissal are problematic if you boil them down to what feeds into them and take it to its logical end:
If the singular, passionate author is legitimate and the studio team is not, does it suddenly delegitimize the work if you have two passionate authors working together? Three then? Five? Fifteen? More, and some other for-hire talent to help them complete the final product? At what point are you choosing to dismiss the group work of people whose enthusiasm you would have championed individually, and why?
And then, as referenced above, if the studio-team is always legitimate but a singular fan author not, how dispassionate, and how much of a singular creative voice must the project be lacking, for it to not be the same thing? The logical end becomes this strange “prior investment is bad, and/or (more) singular creative voices are bad” idea that I hope no one would actually cling to, even though it winds up being what they’re inadvertently arguing.
Either kind of extreme, automatic dismissal is bad. Just ... tend to only see the latter, in
Super’s case, and you tend to see it a lot.
