Not exactly about anime or manga
per se, but do any of you folks have any stories of your own youâd like to see adapted into the medium some day? (Hey, we can all dream, even if itâs just a pipe dream
)
A while back Iâve crafted two stories as a school project. The first is admittedly utterly random and involves a boy thinking his mother threw away his school project (âThe Most Funniest Story in the Worldâ*). He chases a garbage truck which can transform into a giant robot, which then proceeds to fight a two-dimensional, t-shirt wearing dinosaur. Disappointed with his lack of success, he heads home - to find his mother kidnapped by a renegade spy. The
God from the Machine - summoned by the boyâs punching the front door (in reality a recycled piece of the Doors of Hades) in frustration and chagrin - descends in a
crane and comes to his rescue with the armies of Hades, decked in 11th century armor (
mail hauberks and
spangenhelms) and wielding
M61 Vulcans arrive to save the day. The rescued mother reveals that the boyâs project was at the top of the shelf all along, and when the boy does pass the project over the next days, he receives low marks - thereby ultimately proving his quest to be completely useless. Turns out that the mother, the garbage truck-slash-robot, the dinosaur, the God from the Machine, the renegade spy, and the armies of the underworld are all card-carrying members of
The International Society for Convenient Plot Devices.
- Once upon a time, King Sausage ruled over the Kingdom of Frankfurt. One day, a thief named Sushimaru stole the kingâs socks while he was sleeping. When the king woke up and could not find his socks, he said, âWhere in the world did my socks go?â So he drove over to a nearby department store and bought himself a new pair. And he lived happily ever after, the end.
That first story is NOT what I want.
As for the second story, it is very much a dystopian type of story.
During the 24th century (according to the former calendar), much of the world is now ruled by a totalitarian form of govenment. Great strides have been made in the fields of science and technology - in short, mankind has succeeded in building itself a utopia. However, beneath all this facade lies tyranny. In this particular society, people are divided into three classes: the
archontes (ćŻé
č
shihaisha), the privileged elite; the
eligibiles (ć樊人
yĹŤkenjin), the common people who are ostensibly âeligibleâ to hold rights; and the
rustici (čłć°
senmin), ânon-humansâ who do not have any rights whatsoever - not even the right to have names - and are legally no better than animals. (Influences include the
burakumin of Japan, the
dalits of India, the
al-akhdam of Yemen, etc.)
The
rustici were to live in specially-assigned areas known as
settlements, comparable to the
Jewish ghettos and
concentration camps combined. There are no prisons in this society: committing a heinous crime is eligible, if not for summary execution, then for the stripping of oneâs rights and and demotion into a
rusticus, in which case all of oneâs records are erased, making one a
nonperson. I imagine these âsettlementsâ very much resembling
the squatter areas in the Philippines, in more ways than one. The
rustici are composed of undesirables and outcasts, such as the physically âimperfectâ and those who are deemed to be a threat to society.
While the rest of society has advanced in many ways, the
rustici are âprimitiveâ in that many of them still use technology that has since become obsolete. They do not have a part in general society (one could argue that normally they are not even considered to exist), being made so that they are literally segregated and hidden from the eyes of everyone else. (Again, subtle Filipino
reference.) Despite their âinvisibleâ status, however, the state police often engage in periodic â
purgesâ to keep the numbers of
rustici in check. So on one side, you have Paradise (the âperfect worldâ the
archontes and the
eligibiles live in), while on the other side lies Hell. But in this case, Paradise may in fact be Hell disguised and vice versa.
This of course being a totalitarian society, there is actually a lot of suppression and censorship going on behind the scenes (a la
Nineteen Eighty-Four). The government
has its own official history and ideology: to even think of questioning it is a one-way ticket to either death or loss of oneâs human status (not that there is any difference between the two).
So for the story. A former journalist for the official paper was âsentâ to Settlement Area 33 (known to its residents as âthe Townâ) because of what is perceived to be a
thoughtcrime on her part: voicing some concern about the articles the paper publishes about the stateâs history. She meets an orphan boy who is blind in one eye (Iâm simply calling him the âKidâ here), who works as a garbage collector. The boy dubs her âProfessorâ (thinking she was one) and becomes her companion and guide through the Town. The âProfessorâ is exposed to a different world: she finds that despite the general hardship and cruelty the
rustici face from the state (for one, the Townâs rubbish dump is filled with the corpses of victims of periodic purges - the Kid even expresses surprise at the fact that people âon the other sideâ
inter their dead instead of their throwing their bodies to rot), they are warm and support each other by solidarity, that sort of positive stuff - compared to âthe other sideâ, where everything is like a whitewashed tomb: nice on the outside, rotten on the inside.
Now, what the Professor really wants to know - the same reason that made her a
rusticus in the first place - beyond all the lies and the propaganda was (as she puts it) âthe truthful facts.â The thing that drives her further deeper and deeper into the mystery is an old, tattered history book the Kid had somehow found in the rubbish dump (this in itself is odd, as most
rustici are illiterate; it isnât really a law
per se, but the general stance is that
rustici must
not be educated). But the thing that really sets her is the old man (âGrampsâ) who runs an impromptu
food stall.
