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| THIS IS A MANGA ONLY DISCUSSION POST. DO NOT DISCUSS ANYTHING BEYOND THIS CHAPTER. ---------------------------------------- The second volume of Phoenix is vastly different from the first one. The ancient Japan is left behind while we travel to far future and witness the end and rebirth of humanity. I was listening to some post-rock albums during the reading and it really enhanced my already atmospheric experience. This story features the reincarnated Saruta from the 1st story (and it's hinted by the Phoenix that we'll meet him again), but overall it focuses more on global philosophical questions about existence, life and immortality rather than on character relationships. Although they're present too, and there's a whole theme of the relationship of man and other sentient species (called moopies here). I guess it has been explored a lot throught the history of media in the form of the "man and machine" trope, but since Hi no Tori is so old, maybe it's one of the pioneering works of this genre, who knows. I felt really sorry for immortal Masato. As a person familiar with the philosophical views of antinatalists, I can understand the pain of existence, all the more so of infinite existence. Living alone forever without an option to die really sounds like a torture. This volume also features a commentary by Tezuka written in 1969. Turns out that Tezuka-sensei was planning to tie all of the stories together in the last volume set in present times. Unluckily, he died before accomplishing this task, so I guess that all we have now is a collection of independent stories. They're still good on their own though. |
St0rmbladeSep 22, 2019 8:02 AM
| I got goosebumps after the last page, holy shit it's really good. |
| Volume 2 review: A masterpiece Masato turning immortal was not something I expected to see, but I'm glad to see it was handled perfectly. He lost everything he loved, and had to live forever through misery as he could not end his own life. Coping with death was another topic covered, with Roc (I think that was his name, the one who followed the computer mindlessly) do anything to survive like blow up a family trying to defect. As he was exposed to radiation and doomed to die, he watched over the city he caused to explode and laughed off his sad emotions.. It seems like Saruta is one of the character who will be reoccurring, and his trait of pulling absolutely no girls. His way of coping with death was to complete his research on Tamimi and to pass on his wisdom to Masato. He did not care if humans lived, if his synthetic animals did, he wanted some form of life or consciousness to survive. But sadly, he failed. There were other topics covered too like the "Moopie Game" being a pretty obvious allegory to drugs and taking in so many of them to separate yourself from the horrors of the real world. Let's also not forget the computers in charge of the underground cities represented religions, how humans would govern themselves to something else's standards, how they would break up with their girlfriends if their religion- or better to say, mother computer told them to. Each city listened to a different computer which eventually caused a war between each other. There was less comedy than Volume 1 but one joke that stood out to me was Masato telling an AI Tamimi to say something smart and she spat out a complicated math equation lmao. Also, it was pretty interesting how the start of Vol 1 was shown when showing the billions of years started to pass on and humans or other advanced creatures rose and died. Just shows how much the Phoenix has experienced, but also my only complaint of this chapter. The only thing I have to slightly complain about is that we did not get to see the heat death in the universe, but I just looked it up and that will be at least 4-5 billion years ahead while Volume 2 only spanned 3 billion years. I am just bringing that up because this process was shown in another beloved series of mine and it was the coolest shit ever, I thought the artist had not thought of it but it is simply way too ahead- maybe a future volume will touch on that. All in all, a very great short story. Took me about an hour to get through. I forgot to touch on this but the pages are formatted so creatively and its a shame a lot of the modern manga I read don't even try to be as fun or dynamic. Here's one example from this volume that stuck out to me a lot: |
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