Nice coming back to this after a week off. I enjoy deduction scenes where they bounce ideas off each other and work out more things based on what they know.
The task still seems completely impossible, but I like the idea of training the little children for the escape by playing hide and seek!
The other thing I enjoyed this week, is that some of the vocabulary that was difficult in the first few chapters is coming up repeatedly so it feels like it’s getting easier to read.
I’m enjoying the manga too, but one thing that’s making me a bit uncomfortable is how クローネ is depicted. I noticed a bit in volume 1 and certainly seems to be continuing.
There’s a tendency to exaggerate certain physical features such as thicker lips, large nose etc that have previously been used in quite racist art depicting black people. Obviously this manga does seem to exaggerate and distort facial features quite a bit anyway, but it still doesn’t sit right.
Yeah, I agree with this. Especially with her being the only black character, who’s also a villain, who’s also [next chapter spoilers] extra strong and fast. If it was just one of those things I wouldn’t mind, but overall her depiction is my one gripe with this manga right now.
Yeah, good points. She’s not actually the only black character. Don is black, as is one of the younger children who’s featured quite a bit (he’s on the front cover of volume 1). She’s not the only villain either, Isabella is white and she’s been the main villain so far.
There was always something odd about her that made me uncomfortable and I hadn’t appreciated what it was til you pointed it out.
Interestingly when we got a flashback of her as a child in chapter 6 she didn’t have those same exaggerated features, only as an adult.
The omake page between chapters 9 and 10 has an even darker-skinned kid named Jemima, though I can’t remember her playing much of a role in the story. (Though, she does appear in the live-action movie, played by an actual black girl, and is one of the few non-Asian actors with speaking lines. Both Krone and Don are played by Japanese actors.)
Ah yeah, but those kids also don’t have the textured hair or exaggerated features, so I still think my point is fair that there aren’t any prominent heroes with textured hair or Black facial features.
I can’t speak for other countries, but ‘Jemima’ does have a negative association with the ‘mammy’ stereotype in America.
I do think that in this series this kind of stuff is probably not out of malice, but more of ignorance. Like, to be fair, both villains are drawn in exaggerated ways in the scary scenes. It just comes across differently when that’s done with white characters (isabelle) vs black characters (クローネ) due to the history of racial stereotypes in art, and it’s probably something the author didn’t think about.
I wouldn’t really know of any associations - the only thing that springs to me mind when I think of the name “Jemima” is this.
The general feel I get from Google results is that yeah, Americans find it problematic, Brits see no issue, but Aussies think of Play School. Also, today I learnt (though I’m sure I’d known it before) that the name is Biblical - it’s the name of the eldest of Job’s second batch of daughters.
How are people getting along with the book? I found the last few weeks a bit harder going than the first volume, and the storyline seemed to have slowed down a bit - although picked up again this week.
Chapter 11
It was interesting they chose to tell Gilda and Don part of the truth but not the whole truth. They left out the demons and the fact that the other children are dead.
I like the strategy of telling two suspects false information to try and flush out a mole. However, we are left on a bit of a cliff hanger. The note under the door to Isabella was the information given to Don (not sure why it’s written in English). However, it is Gilda creeping out in the night. Which one is the mole - or is it neither…?
They’ve all got Western names, and it’s a fairly Western setting, so I imagine they’re all speaking in English and it’s just Translation Convention that it appears to us in Japanese.
That makes sense. I looked back and found several examples of written items being in English - books that children were reading, headings on a written list, the words “mom” and “me” on a children’s drawing on a wall.
I’m still getting on quite well with it, but agree it’s hard going at times. I’ve been re-reading to check my understanding. I’m still happy with the pace.
