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Ribon no Kishi/Princess Knight: The original girl prince
So I got a friend of mine (who really is an extraordinary human being in multiple ways), K, who's still living in Japan, to send me the complete Ribon no Kishi in Japanese, since a) I don't read untranslated manga and b) the bilingual edition is basically one of the unicorns of American manga--copies are currently going for $152 on Amazon.com, so it's essentially out of print, and it remains perhaps the greatest Tezuka work not widely available in English.
K and I, for fledgling manga experts, have a dirty secret: We kind of can't stand Tezuka on general principles. But if one is going to write a paper on transvestism in anime, as I am currently doing, one can't not read Ribon no Kishi (frankly I don't really care for either title), and to my surprise I actually enjoyed the manga far more than I thought I would. The plot is baroque: Sapphire, the child of the king of Silverland, is given both a boy's and a girl's heart before her birth in heaven thanks to mischievous angel Tink, who's promptly exiled to Earth to get the boy's heart back. Tink starts dressing like a Keebler elf and spends approximately 15 years living like an outlaw in the woods--later on God reprimands him for going native. Baby Sapphire, meanwhile, thanks to a courtier's accent, is announced to the realm (which follows strict male primogeniture, like ancien regime France) as a prince, so her parents force her to cross-dress as a boy growing up, though sometimes she also puts on a blonde wig and goes out in public as the girl Briar Rose (hello, Sleeping Beauty reference!). After King Sapphire is exposed as female, imprisoned for treason, and escapes, she becomes the Ribbon Knight, opposed to the injustice of the young idiot King Plastic and his scheming dad Duke Duralmin and Duralmin's loyal henchman, Sir Nylon, who is creepily fixated on Sapphire's gender. Surprisingly, most people still call her "Prince Sapphire" even after she's exposed and deposed. In one amusing Disney ripoff early on, Tink pulls a Snow White and nearly gets Sapphire killed. He's a much better character after he stops being so selfish.
The second volume finds Sapphire on the high seas in the company of Captain Blood, who doesn't accept her male gender presentation and says he wants to marry her--Blood even gets Sapphire to wear a dress, albeit in the privacy of her cabin, whereupon she's consumed by fantasies of her true love Prince Franz (who hates Sapphire, ha ha!) and revolted anew by the Captain. Things get really interesting after Blood and Sapphire return to Silverland...wait, did I forget to mention the witch Hel, who keeps trying to steal Sapphire's girl's heart so that her daughter Hecate can act more girlish and marry Franz and deliver Franz' kingdom Goldland in to Hel's hands? Did I mention that Franz' uncle is named Chanel? Hecate is actually one of my favorite characters; she doesn't care about being girlish, is unwilling to marry an unwilling Franz, and foils her mother's plans repeatedly. Also Hel transforms into a dragon a la Maleficent in this book, which is again amusing. Tezuka really did like Disney.
Without giving anything away, the third volume descends into incoherence--despite the fact that Tink has been praying to God and brandishing crosses at people, he appeals to the Olympian gods for a little power over death (which actually the Olympian gods don't have, but who cares?), and Tezuka seems to forget completely that Gold and Silverland exist, let alone care about either of them, or what happens there--but why care about little details like that when one can stuff in another Snow White homage (though that bastard Nylon does show up to taunt Sapphire towards the end)? Ugh. The only good thing, from what I could tell during my quick, disgusted page-through, is that Sapphire is able to fight and uses "boku" despite having lost her boy's heart--in the first volume, as soon as she forgets or loses her boy's heart she's immediately as weak as a cut flower, which is just teeth-gnashingly vexing to this reader.
In some ways, reading this manga through the lens of Vested Interests, I think Tezuka wrote something far deeper than he knew. I also think I'm probably going to pick up the second manga at some point just to find out what happens to Sapphire in the end vis-a-vis that whole realm that's hers and has gone to the dogs. But I am much less anti-Tezuka, in some ways, than when I started, so I think that's good too.
K and I, for fledgling manga experts, have a dirty secret: We kind of can't stand Tezuka on general principles. But if one is going to write a paper on transvestism in anime, as I am currently doing, one can't not read Ribon no Kishi (frankly I don't really care for either title), and to my surprise I actually enjoyed the manga far more than I thought I would. The plot is baroque: Sapphire, the child of the king of Silverland, is given both a boy's and a girl's heart before her birth in heaven thanks to mischievous angel Tink, who's promptly exiled to Earth to get the boy's heart back. Tink starts dressing like a Keebler elf and spends approximately 15 years living like an outlaw in the woods--later on God reprimands him for going native. Baby Sapphire, meanwhile, thanks to a courtier's accent, is announced to the realm (which follows strict male primogeniture, like ancien regime France) as a prince, so her parents force her to cross-dress as a boy growing up, though sometimes she also puts on a blonde wig and goes out in public as the girl Briar Rose (hello, Sleeping Beauty reference!). After King Sapphire is exposed as female, imprisoned for treason, and escapes, she becomes the Ribbon Knight, opposed to the injustice of the young idiot King Plastic and his scheming dad Duke Duralmin and Duralmin's loyal henchman, Sir Nylon, who is creepily fixated on Sapphire's gender. Surprisingly, most people still call her "Prince Sapphire" even after she's exposed and deposed. In one amusing Disney ripoff early on, Tink pulls a Snow White and nearly gets Sapphire killed. He's a much better character after he stops being so selfish.
The second volume finds Sapphire on the high seas in the company of Captain Blood, who doesn't accept her male gender presentation and says he wants to marry her--Blood even gets Sapphire to wear a dress, albeit in the privacy of her cabin, whereupon she's consumed by fantasies of her true love Prince Franz (who hates Sapphire, ha ha!) and revolted anew by the Captain. Things get really interesting after Blood and Sapphire return to Silverland...wait, did I forget to mention the witch Hel, who keeps trying to steal Sapphire's girl's heart so that her daughter Hecate can act more girlish and marry Franz and deliver Franz' kingdom Goldland in to Hel's hands? Did I mention that Franz' uncle is named Chanel? Hecate is actually one of my favorite characters; she doesn't care about being girlish, is unwilling to marry an unwilling Franz, and foils her mother's plans repeatedly. Also Hel transforms into a dragon a la Maleficent in this book, which is again amusing. Tezuka really did like Disney.
Without giving anything away, the third volume descends into incoherence--despite the fact that Tink has been praying to God and brandishing crosses at people, he appeals to the Olympian gods for a little power over death (which actually the Olympian gods don't have, but who cares?), and Tezuka seems to forget completely that Gold and Silverland exist, let alone care about either of them, or what happens there--but why care about little details like that when one can stuff in another Snow White homage (though that bastard Nylon does show up to taunt Sapphire towards the end)? Ugh. The only good thing, from what I could tell during my quick, disgusted page-through, is that Sapphire is able to fight and uses "boku" despite having lost her boy's heart--in the first volume, as soon as she forgets or loses her boy's heart she's immediately as weak as a cut flower, which is just teeth-gnashingly vexing to this reader.
In some ways, reading this manga through the lens of Vested Interests, I think Tezuka wrote something far deeper than he knew. I also think I'm probably going to pick up the second manga at some point just to find out what happens to Sapphire in the end vis-a-vis that whole realm that's hers and has gone to the dogs. But I am much less anti-Tezuka, in some ways, than when I started, so I think that's good too.