Roasting Apple Black, Chapter 2 (Part 5)
Remember the advice your father gave you on your wedding day: If you ever travel back in time, don’t step on anything!
Before Sano can join the guild, Mikael challenges him to a round of Capture the Flag.
All of the classmates (I counted 10, not including Sano) are here to watch. Ryuzaki and Symon are inexplicably in a big tower, and before anyone makes any Statler and Waldorf comparisons, we get some absolutely brutal text bubble placement.
I guess if Fat Guy isn’t sure why his arm is special, that means The Prophesy isn’t widely known. And neither is the immense bounty on Sano’s arm/head.
Or maybe Fat guy is just stupid, but I doubt that. Surely, we would never get something so fatphobic from The World’s Most Diverse Manga Publishers.
Or maybe— maybe— maybe you get lines like this when you don’t build your world with an internal consistency or characters that even resemble real people, and instead of an underlying logic driving the plot forward, everything is just a big mishmash of “who can beat up who,” and logic doesn’t matter, consistency doesn’t matter, character interactions don’t fucking matter as long as you squeeze in every chance to get a guy smirking and going Heh…. not impressed.
In the heat of the fight, we get an interesting plot twist: Mikael’s cigarette is actually his wand. Nice. This is a cool moment, and everyone in the class gives their highly personal reaction (a storytelling flourish that’s very at-home with shonen manga)
And this would’ve been a great page, but I’m real distracted by Opal’s textwall.
“Wands help amplify spells cast by a sorcerer. At this rate, professor Mikael using his wand at all is not gonna help Sano’s chances.”
(Here’s how I’d rewrite it: “If Mikael uses his wand, Sano is cooked.”)
Why is she saying the first sentence? (“Wands help amplify spells cast by a sorcerer.”) Who is she saying that to? They’re all in the same damn class, I assume everyone here knows how wands work. If it’s to tell the audience, surely there’s a better way to tell us the basic mechanisms of a wand.
But there’s even dumber and clumsier worldbuilding a few pages later. While Sano teleports during the fight, he thinks back to what Angelo told him:
“Remember, sano… A sorcerer must call the wand’s name and the desired command to cast spells conjuring sorcery. Also, while difficult, with the right amount of impulse and contact, sorcerers can neutralize an opponent’s wand with their own impulse.”
Terrible. Terrible, terrible, terrible. Terrible. Terrible!!!
I’m reminded of the best example of flashback information driving the plot forward, found in The Simpsons.
Homer travels back in time, and he thinks: “Remember the advice your father gave you on your wedding day: If you ever travel back in time, don’t step on anything! Because even the tiniest change can alter the future in ways you can’t imagine.”
If I may dissect this frog: This Simpsons joke is funny because this isn’t the kind of advice a father typically gives his son on his wedding day. Homer continuously fucking with the timeline is what drives this storyline, and we needed a way to set up to the audience that even a tiny change can impact the future. So the audience needs to know this bit of technical information, and it’s delivered to us through this flashback… but this isn’t the kind of advice typically heard on a wedding day, so it’s funny! It doesn’t drag things down! We see Abe Simpson poof into a thought cloud, deliver the line, and then the scene carries on.
Anyway, let me back up to some of the grand character declarations Sano made during his fight with Mikael.
First we have this page:
Nothing to really snark on here. I thought these pages were worth mentioning in case they later fumble on any of these grand declarations. “I fight to end the fighting” feels vaguely pro-military, pro-cop, and time will tell if this ends up being a Cool cop manga (like tokyo revengers) or a lame one (like tokyo revengers).
“Best to help from within the system, I suppose.” muses Sano. Bold words coming from the protagonist of an OEL manga, an art form that is definitively outside of The System.
But Sano keeps fucking talking, because “I fight to end the fighting” wasn’t enough.
This statement that Sano wants his own dreams is pretty close to his closing speech at the end of chapter 1, so why he’s saying it is anyone’s guess (he could’ve used that space to tell us about the wands, goddammit!)
Maybe this is something really weighing on his mind, so he keeps bringing it up.
Just like how characters keep saying “The night is nigh.”
And every time I see this I think back to when Whyt did a thuper cool animation of Arodihs Sano except he mispelled “nigh” so it just looks kinda dopey.
And why do the characters constantly say “The night is nigh?” Because Whyt watched Game of Thrones and wanted his own “winter is coming.”
Anyway, Sano wins Mikael’s game, gets into the guild, there’s lots of merriment that there’s finally a new student, and we cut to Angelo and Madame Naomi observing the scene from afar.
On the last page, a Mysterious Guy picks up the newspaper we saw early in the chapter. To no one, he promises: “When you show yourselves… I’ll be waiting.” More teasing and intriguiry, and since this story hasn’t given me any reason to care about him, I will not share his picture, he’s not important, until he does fucking anything he’s not important.
Apple Black hasn’t given me a reason to care about anything happening. How the fuck we’re 96 pages into a comic and I haven’t felt a single thing is a miracle.