We Are Going To Make A Manga

I read a lot of manga. A lot of romance manga. More than is probably healthy, and I say that as someone who has audited their own reading habits with the same grim obsession I bring to untangling spaghetti code at 2am.

Maybe it’s that. Maybe spending enough hours staring into the abyss of an undocumented codebase, searching desperately for patterns in something that was clearly written by a raccoon who learned to type, has trained my brain to find structure everywhere, even where it doesn’t want to be found. Especially here.

Okay. Right now. In front of you. We’re building one from scratch, you and me, right here on this page, and you will leave a changed person. Or at least a person who has read something.

Ready? Let’s go.

Part One: The School

Chapter One: The Protagonist

His name is Ren.

Black hair, bowl cut. Arms like cooked spaghetti. The resting expression of a man who has been asked to describe a cloud. He does not have a personality so much as a placeholder where one could theoretically be installed, a USB port waiting for the personality drive, which is you, the reader, and which you will now insert through the miracle of blank-slate identification.

Our galaxy’s supermassive black hole - the thing that bends spacetime itself, the gravitational mouth at the centre of the Milky Way - is less dark and less dense than whatever is going on behind Ren’s eyes.

I did not choose Ren. I want to be clear about that. The genre has gravity. It has a centre of mass. It pulls everything toward it with the indifferent force of a celestial body, and Ren is what lives at the centre: an event horizon in a school uniform. I am the light that didn’t make it out.

He is, deliberately, a vessel. An empty cup. A clean parking lot, still warm, faint smell of tar. The logic is sound, in a depressing way: give him a real personality and some reader somewhere will disagree with it. Ren is a diplomatic solution to the problem of subjectivity. Ren is a peace treaty written in blankness, ratified by everyone, meaning nothing.

Ren walks to school.

Chapter One: The Love Interest

She is standing at the school gate like a life-size cardboard promotional cutout positioned there by a marketing department. Waiting. Inert. A Pokémon that has fully loaded in and is ready to battle.

Her name is Yuki. It is the Comic Sans of names: technically inoffensive, universally legible, impossible to mount a coherent objection to, deployed industry-wide because nobody has the energy to fight it. So: Yuki. Fine. Moving on.

She has long dark hair, perfectly straight, rendered strand by strand with a devotion that exceeds anything the story will spend on her inner life. There is a ribbon, bloody red, which the camera will return to later with a frequency that implies significance and will, in fact, imply nothing else. She is looking slightly to the side with an expression that implies inner depths she will not be given enough panel time to actually develop.

Here is the problem with Yuki, stated plainly: if you covered everything except her silhouette, you could not tell her from any other girl in any other manga. She would pass through airport security undetected. She is a shape. A very detailed shape, with hair carrying more line weight than her entire inner life, and a red ribbon, but underneath all of that rendering: a shape. Ren would also fail the silhouette test, but Ren’s blankness is critical. Ren’s blankness is a structural feature. Yuki’s is an accident of deadline.

The moment Ren arrives, something happens to Yuki at a cellular level. Her heart does a thing. Her face twitches. Every female character within a three-chapter radius snaps toward him like meerkats registering a hawk, and the hawk is a boy who walked through a gate at a normal speed, carrying a bag, performing no miracles.

This will happen every time Ren enters a room. The author cannot afford to let it not happen. Here is the thing: the author has a profound and understandable terror of ambiguity. If a single reader closes this volume uncertain whether there is a romance occurring, if one person looks at Yuki looking at Ren and thinks maybe they’re just friends, that reader might not buy the next volume. The dashboard must light up. The internal monologue must activate. The air must change quality whenever he gets close, which it will, every single time, because the author is not writing romance. The author is writing reassurance. Yes. This. Still happening. Keep reading. Please. Volume four comes out in March.

Here is the thing about Yuki’s love: it is not exactly for Ren. Ren is just the delivery mechanism. The love is addressed to whoever is currently behind Ren’s eyes, slid under the door, no return address. Yuki is in love with the reader. She has been in love with the reader this whole time. Ren has absolutely no idea.

There is also Takeru. He sits two rows over. He is very tall and his family has money and he has been watching Yuki since the start of term with an expression the narrative frames as brooding and the camera frames as romantic, but which is, if you look at it without the framing, just a boy who has decided he is owed something. He gave Yuki a handkerchief once, unsolicited, in the rain. Yuki thanked him. The narrative logged this as a rival encounter. Nobody in the room asked why he had a monogrammed handkerchief ready.

He will be resolved by True Love in chapter thirty.

Chapter Three: Physical Contact

Ren and Yuki are assigned to clean the classroom together after school. They both reach for the same eraser.

Their fingers touch for approximately 0.4 seconds.

Six pages. Six full pages dedicated to the eraser incident. Double spreads. Geometric negative space. A close-up on knuckles that would not be out of place in a medical textbook. Someone’s internal monologue reads …! - technically not a sentence, technically not even a thought, but landing with the narrative weight of the complete works of Tolstoy, annotated. The eraser hangs in the air between them, suspended in artistic intent, a peace offering and a grenade and possibly both simultaneously.

This is, I should note, a story in which the camera has already panned, lovingly and at length, across the lower half of a sixteen-year-old girl’s body, framed like a nature documentary that has identified a particularly notable specimen. The upskirt was handled with a confidence that suggested the editorial team considered it unremarkable. The eraser, however, the eraser, the brief and incidental collision of two sets of knuckles required six pages, a crisis of feeling, and at least one character wondering if they were going to die.

I’m not saying hand-holding is more intimate than a panty shot. I’m saying someone in a room decided it was, wrote it down, and nobody stopped them.

Chapter Six: The Backstory

Alright. The genre requires a wound. Every protagonist needs one, filed and labeled and ready for deployment, and here is Ren’s:

When he was nine, his childhood friend moved away. She stood at the door of her family’s house. She did not look back. He stood in the falling cherry blossoms, they were contractually obligated to be falling, this is non-negotiable, it is in the rider, and he decided, right there in that moment, with the petals and the specific quality of the afternoon light, that he would not let anyone close again. Because closeness ends. Because people leave. Because this afternoon was so cinematically complete that it would function as the psychological key for the next sixty chapters.

Every wall Ren builds: that door. When he eventually cries, somewhere around chapter forty, there will be blossoms again. There will always be blossoms again.

Here is the thing about real people: they don’t come with a labeled wound and a timestamp. You meet someone who flinches when you raise your voice and they cannot tell you why, not really, not with a ribbon on it, because whatever made them that way wasn’t one afternoon, one door, one cinematically meaningful moment of non-eye-contact. It was a Tuesday when something small happened and then a Wednesday when something else did and then six months of low-level ambient noise that nobody logged, that doesn’t have a visual metaphor, that couldn’t be rendered in panel form without just being a gray rectangle that says time passing unpleasantly on it.

Manga psychology comes with an origin, a label, and a resolution. Delivered via flashback. Filed under: tragic. Reference when crying. Works great. Is nothing like a person.

Chapter Twelve: The Confession

Yuki has, technically, been confessing since chapter two. She made him food. She texted him at midnight with a typo that was obviously intentional, a single extra vowel, a trembling finger theory, plausible deniability maintained by a thread. She sat next to him at the fireworks festival, shoulders touching, for eleven consecutive pages - eleven - in a medium where page space is money, which means someone looked at eleven pages of shoulder contact and said yes, this is a sound financial decision. At one point she said, out loud, with her mouth, using words in a conventional sequence, something that in any other context would have resolved the entire situation by page fifteen.

He thought she was being friendly.

This is not an accident of characterisation. Ren is not oblivious because Ren is oblivious. Ren is oblivious by structural necessity, required to be an idiot, because if Ren understood what was happening then the reader would also understand what was happening, and then the story would have to generate tension from somewhere else. From, for instance, something happening. Characters might have to change. Events might have to occur. The whole beautiful machine of almost, eleven pages of shoulder contact, a trembling vowel, the eraser would have to give way to actually, and actually is terrifying because actually ends.

So instead: chapter thirteen, in which a new girl transfers into the class. White hair, cut bluntly at the shoulder. She is looking slightly to the side. She appears to have come from somewhere, though the narrative does not say where, in the same way it does not say a great many things. She is looking at Ren.

Chapter fourteen, in which Yuki notices the new girl looking at Ren, and her ribbon tightens almost imperceptibly, and the panel lingers on her profile for exactly long enough.

We are not finishing this storyline. We are doing the side quests. There is one main mission left and when it is completed the game ends, so we are cleaning every dungeon, exhausting every NPC, farming materials we do not need. The credits are a day’s walk away and we have decided, categorically, not to take another step toward them.

Ren is on the third floor of the school.

He is thinking, in his characteristically empty way, about nothing in particular. The window is open. It is a very large window, one of those floor-to-ceiling institutional panels that schools install because someone once decided teenagers needed to feel connected to the outside world, and which have since served primarily as a source of drafts.

Something is happening in the street below.

A truck is happening.

It is a large truck, moving at a speed that implies either a scheduling emergency or a total mechanical failure, and it is aimed, with uncanny precision, at the third floor of the school. Not the first floor. Not the ground. The third floor, specifically, where Ren is standing, thinking about nothing.

There is no foreshadowing for this, to be clear. There were no warning signs in previous chapters. No mysterious figure in a hood. No dream sequence. No prophetic text on Ren’s phone. The truck is not a metaphor. It is a truck. It weighs eighteen tonnes and it has decided, with the calm certainty of something that always knew, that Ren’s chapter ends here, on a Tuesday, in a building, with the eraser situation still unresolved and eleven pages of shoulder contact amounting to nothing.

The truck, I should mention, knew. This is simply how it works. It always knows. It is very good at its job.

The window does not put up much of a fight.

Interlude: The Part We Skip

Ren had a mother. A father. A best friend from middle school who still owed him three hundred yen. He had seventeen years of accumulated understanding about how reality works - gravity, money, the train schedule, the faces of people he would never see again. He had a room with a poster on the wall. He had a body that had learned exactly how to sleep.

All of this is gone now. We are moving on.

Part Two: The Other Story

The Same Chapter One: The Protagonist

He wakes up in a field.

His name is still Ren. This is not a coincidence. Nothing about this is a coincidence, but we will not be examining that.

A blue rectangle appears in front of his face.

╔══════════════════════════════╗
║  HERO DETECTED               ║
║  NAME: Ren                   ║
║  LEVEL: 1                    ║
║  STATS: [INCOMPREHENSIBLE]   ║
║  STATUS: Reborn              ║
╚══════════════════════════════╝

He cannot read the language of this world yet. The box is in the language of this world anyway. He looks at it. He accepts it. He stands up.

This is the correct response. The genre does not have time for epistemological crisis. The genre has a status screen, a destiny, and a firm publication schedule, and Ren - empty, blank, a clean parking lot still warm with the heat of a previous life he will not be discussing - is once again the perfect vessel for all of it. Our galaxy’s supermassive black hole, relocated. The event horizon has new clothes now: a linen tunic, slightly too large, which he was apparently wearing when he arrived.

He does not have a personality so much as a placeholder where one could theoretically be installed. In this respect he is exactly the same as before. The truck, it turns out, was not a character-building exercise.

He walks toward the town.

The Same Chapter One: The Love Interest

The market is extraordinary. This is the first thing that must be established: the market is extraordinary. The bread gleams as bread does not gleam in any existing photograph of medieval bread. The vegetables are large and unblemished. The merchants have all their fingers and the fingers are clean. Everyone has good teeth, not good by the standards of a world without sugar and with intermittent access to water clean enough to drink, but good by the standards of a dental practice in a major city, today, with fluoride. Everywhere Ren looks: abundance. Color. Variety. The cheerful low roar of commerce conducted by people who are clearly fine.

The guild responsible for this market, and there would be a guild, there is always a guild, the guild would have the unlicensed vendors’ stalls disassembled and their operators’ kneecaps re-evaluated before sundown - is nowhere to be seen. The tithe collector, who would in a reasonable approximation of this era be somewhere on the premises calculating what percentage of these merchants’ earnings belongs to the lord, is also absent. The lord himself is presumably in his manor being romantic. His serfs legally unable to leave, working six days of seven in his fields nowhere to be seen, which is good because they would disrupt the color palette.

The church has a building. It is decorative. There is one priest. He seems vaguely stern. He will later turn out to have a good heart.

Ren is looking at a stall.

At the stall there is a girl holding a skewer of meat, and something is happening to her at a cellular level, and every woman within a three-chapter radius has snapped toward him like meerkats registering a hawk, and the hawk is a boy who walked into a market at a normal speed, wearing a slightly-too-large tunic, arriving from the direction of a field.

She is standing there like a life-size cardboard promotional cutout positioned there by a marketing department.

Her name is Yuki. Obviously her name is Yuki. Bloody red ribbon. Long dark hair, rendered strand by strand with a devotion that exceeds anything the story will spend on her inner life. Looking slightly to the side. Implying inner depths. Running out of panel time as we speak.

The skewer is in her right hand. Ren’s hand goes out to take it, she is, after all, holding it toward him; this is the transaction, this is what stalls are for, and her hand goes to release it at the same moment, naturally, as you do, as anyone would, and their fingers arrive at the same point in space at the same time, which is a coincidence of the most ordinary kind, and something happens.

Their fingers are in contact for approximately 0.4 seconds.

Six pages. The skewer hangs between them. Double spreads. Geometric negative space. A close-up on knuckles, rendered with an exactitude that would serve equally well in a medical context, or as evidence in a court that takes knuckles very seriously. The meat is on the skewer and the skewer is between them and nobody is thinking about the meat. The market roars on behind them, completely unbothered, because the market is a background asset and has not been informed that something is happening. Someone’s internal monologue reads …! - technically not a sentence, technically not even a thought, but landing with the weight of the complete works of Tolstoy, annotated, in a world where access to Tolstoy, or to any book at all, is tightly controlled by an institution that is currently being decorative a few streets over.

The skewer hangs in the air between them, a peace offering and a grenade and possibly both simultaneously.

Chapter Three: The Party

Within seventy-two hours, Ren has a party.

There is a warrior. He is gruff and loyal and has approximately one secret, which will be revealed in volume three and will not change his fundamental gruffness or loyalty. There is a mage. She is mysterious and possibly evil and is holding something back, you can tell because the camera lingers on her eyes in a way that implies concealed depth, which is the same technique used on Yuki, so presumably the mage also has hair detailed enough to survive scrutiny the character could not, and is also, at some level, in love with the reader. There is a healer. The healer is small and optimistic. The healer has not yet encountered anything that has tested this optimism, and we will not be testing it now.

They were looking for Ren. Specifically Ren. They don’t explain how they knew to look. Ren does not ask. We are not asking.

His stats, meanwhile, have become more comprehensible. The blue box has updated.

╔══════════════════════════════════════════╗
║  LEVEL: 1                                ║
║  MAGIC: [TOO MUCH]                       ║
║  REASON: Unclear, possibly cosmological  ║
║  QUEST: Defeat Demon King                ║
║  DEMON KING LOCATION: That Way           ║
╚══════════════════════════════════════════╝

The Demon King’s castle is visible from the market. On a clear day, and it is always a clear day here, no one has hay fever, no one squints in the sun, there are no flies near the meat skewers, which is suspicious, you can see it silhouetted against a sky that is doing entirely too much. Red and purple and a kind of ominous amber that doesn’t exist in nature. The castle is perhaps a week’s ride from the capital. Maybe less. The capital has an army, the army has, by all appearances, been collecting taxes. The Demon King has been here for three hundred years and has not taken the capital, despite being a week away and having, presumably, some form of army of his own.

The gruff loyal warrior does not find this strange. Ren does not ask about it. We are moving on.

Chapter Six: The Backstory

His village was burned.

He remembers it in flashback: the flames, the ash blossoming and drifting on the specific quality of afternoon light, white and soft, settling on his shoulders the way - hmm. The way something does. Something that falls. Something that is also white, also soft, also settling, that also signifies an afternoon from which someone did not look back. He decides, in the heat and the ash and the light, that he will not let anyone close again. Because closeness burns. Because people run. Because this afternoon is so cinematically complete that it will serve as the psychological key for the next sixty chapters.

Every wall Ren builds: that fire. When he eventually cries, somewhere around chapter forty, there will be ash again.

The village, before it burned, was lovely. The peasants were content. Nobody paid the tithe in the flashback, because the tithe is not the kind of thing that gets included in flashbacks - it is part of the gray rectangle, the time passing unpleasantly, the six days of seven in the fields that don’t have a visual metaphor. The flashback has good bread and warm light and a childhood friend who ran and did not look back, and then fire, and that is all the village needs to be. It was enough. It was home. It is now ash.

Chapter Twelve: The Same Confession

Yuki has been confessing since chapter two. She brought him food, actual food, not skewer food, home-cooked food produced in a cottage she maintains with an ease that implies either off-screen domestic labour or the genre’s persistent incuriosity about where meals come from. She sent him a message via the small enchanted bird that serves as this world’s texting infrastructurem, one extra syllable, a trembling tongue theory, plausible deniability maintained by a thread. She sat next to him at the harvest festival, shoulders touching, for eleven pages.

The ale at the harvest festival was described, on the menu board above the stall, as Harvest Mild - suitable for all ages, a designation which appeared to be doing a great deal of work and which nobody at the festival questioned, because the harvest festival is not the place for questions. It is the place for eleven pages of shoulder contact. The bread at the festival was incredible. Nobody was thinking about what percentage of the grain that made this bread had already been taken by the lord, somewhere between a quarter and a third, historically, depending on the region, because the harvest festival is the place for a trembling extra syllable, and Ren thinking she is being friendly.

He has to think she is being friendly. He is structurally required. Actually is still terrifying. Actually still ends.

There is also the lord’s son. He is very tall and his family has the region and he has been watching Yuki since the start of the arc with an expression the narrative frames as brooding and the camera frames as romantic, but which is, if you look at it without the framing, just a man who has decided he is owed something. He gave Yuki a silk ribbon once, unsolicited, at a previous festival. Yuki thanked him. The narrative logged this as a rival encounter. The legal and ecclesiastical infrastructure that would make his claim on her binding, and which the vaguely stern priest is actively maintaining three streets away, is not visible from the festival, which is good because it would disrupt the color palette.

He will be resolved by True Love in chapter thirty.

A new girl arrives in town. White hair, cut bluntly at the shoulder. She is looking slightly to the side. She appears to have come from somewhere, though the narrative does not say where, in the same way it does not say a great many things. She is looking at Ren.

Chapter fourteen, in which Yuki notices the girl looking at Ren, and her ribbon tightens almost imperceptibly, and the panel lingers on her profile for exactly long enough.

We are not finishing this storyline either. There is one main quest and the credits are a week’s ride away, same as the castle, and we are doing everything else. We are talking to every NPC. We are clearing every side dungeon. We are sitting at the harvest festival for eleven pages because eleven pages of almost is so much safer than one page of actually.

The blue box appears, briefly, unprompted.

╔══════════════════════════════════════════╗
║  STATUS UPDATE                           ║
║  DEMON KING: Waiting                     ║
║  CONFESSION: Pending                     ║
║  DISTANCE TO EITHER: Unchanged           ║
╚══════════════════════════════════════════╝

He closes it without reading it. The genre does not require him to read it. The genre only requires that it appear, and that he be present, and that the distance remain what it is.

The Demon King is patient, he has always been patient. He is a week’s ride from a capital he has never taken, standing in a castle visible from the market, silhouetted against a sky doing entirely too much, the same sky, day after day, purple and amber, like a screensaver nobody turned off. Three hundred years. The capital’s army has been collecting taxes. The serfs are in the fields. The ale is suitable for all ages. The ribbon is bloody red. The confession is pending.

The confession was always pending.

The story cannot defeat the Demon King, because after the Demon King there is nothing, no next volume, no serialization, no reassurance. The story cannot let Ren understand what Yuki is saying, for the same reason, in a different building, in a different world, running the same engine underneath. The endpoint and the confession occupy the same structural position: the place the story is always walking toward and never allowed to reach. The distance isn’t a dramatic device. The distance is the story. Remove it and there is nothing left to sell.

That is not a flaw. That is the architecture.

The Demon King stands at his window, if demon kings have windows, and presumably they do, presumably they look out at the same clear sky that looks in at the market, at the bread, at the ribbon, at Ren not understanding, and he waits, the way the endpoint of any serialized story waits: present, visible, permanent, unreachable.

He never was going anywhere.

Neither was the confession.

The credits are a week’s ride away. The window is open. Everything is exactly where it was.