Interview with the Translator: Hills of Silver Ruins, Point of View

Kate: Fantasy depends, to a degree, on point of view. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings depends on Saruman making a personal bid for the ring, which not only puts him in conflict with Sauron but also distracts Sauron’s attention from the divided Fellowship. No matter how evil and long-lived, Sauron only knows what he knows about the ring based on limited information.

Tolkien rather takes point-of-view for granted, so much so that the limitations of knowledge get lost a bit in the movies.

Hills of Silver Ruins, however, not only depends on the limitations of point-of-view, the text, even plot, is about characters overcoming those limitations. When Taiki announces that Asen is the new emperor of Tai, he doesn’t reveal his true intent until later. Others are left to deal with the announcement as best they can.

How important is point of view to fantasy writer? How does Japanese literature handle it generally?

Eugene: In Shadow of the Moon, Ono effectively uses a single, limited POV. In A Thousand Leagues of Wind, she has three POV characters. Hills of Silver Ruins follows the more common cinematic style, the POV shifting from character to character depending on the focus of the scene. But the narrative voice never knows more than what any one POV character knows.

I can't say much about Japanese literature in general, but I think the hard work of creating manga and anime naturally results in a disciplined focus on a small central cast with the POV following the main characters. In manga especially, the constant challenge is to keep the drama going while keeping the workload manageable. Limiting omniscience and the cast solves most narrative problems.

Both problems crop up to an annoying degree in Hollywood productions. In Buffy and especially in Angel, Whedon kept adding cast members until the only thing they could do together was save the world once again, which got boring. The seemingly paradoxical rule of essay writing applies to fiction as well. If you can't think of what to write about, tighten the focus, don't expand it.

Less is more. I think the physical and artistic constraints of television production in the 1960s made Roger Moore as The Saint a better Bond than Roger Moore actually playing James Bond in big-budget movies.

But just as bad, often much worse, is this compulsion by writers to tell the audience everything they know. You see this reflected in the obsession with backstories and origin stories. Not that manga and anime don't do origin stories. Demon Slayer is a great archetypal example. But it is probably more common for characters to be introduced in medias res and their origins revealed later if at all.

Hence the running joke in One Punch Man with Genos trying to find out Saitama's origin story and then being disappointed at how mundane it is.

On the other hand, you can't have characters conveniently forgetting what they should already know. But again, the solution is to maintain a tight narrative focus and POV. 

Watching "Kenobi vs Anakin: The Secret Reason Why It's Boring" by the Literature Devil got me thinking about the big fight scene at the end of the third season of Railgun. The climax of the conflict is not Misaka ("Railgun") defeating her foe (that occurs in the denouement) but figuring out what her motivations are.

As Literature Devil points out, a dramatic arc like this in a fight scene is much more interesting than twenty minutes of two guys hitting each other with swords. The Japanese superhero genre excels at telling a whole story within a single climactic fight scene. (The Literature Devil uses Rurouni Kenshin as an example.) This only works if the audience doesn't already know the whole story.

Demon Slayer turns so many of its extended fight scenes into mini Shakespearean tragedies for the villains that it becomes its own "sympathy for the devil" trope.

I'll also point out that manga and anime dramatists love what Tolkien termed eucatastrophe, "the sudden turn of events at the end of a story which ensures that the protagonist does not meet some terrible, impending, and very plausible doom." Perhaps a bit too much. But, boy, are they good at it, with Demon Slayer, to cite a recent example, constituting a master class on the subject.

I think the "Entertainment District" arc of Demon Slayer is better than the Mugen Train blockbuster movie, though that fight scene could be trimmed a tad here and there. But it certainly addresses the "not enough Nezuko" problem in Mugen Train, with plenty of Nezuko as the best bad-ass demon slayer since Buffy.

Tubi has the first two seasons of Railgun.

https://tubitv.com/series/2312/a-certain-scientific-railgun

Crunchyroll has the whole series.

https://beta.crunchyroll.com/series/G649J4XPY/