#tabata yuuki

[daydreaming-juna]

Black Clover - Chapter 84 Colour Halloween Spread

[evor20]

[gejou]

𝐉𝐔𝐋𝐈𝐔𝐒 & 𝐘𝐀𝐌𝐈 𝐈𝐂𝐎𝐍𝐒 ✨

[16kamaru]

Look at that big-ass library!! I’d never see a daylight ever again if I had a chance to live at a place like this!! */////*

Manga: Black Clover (Yuuki Tabata)

[napcaps]

Black Clover (Chapter 20).

[raizeldarkspear-blog]

Black Clover Anime Reveals 5 More Character Designs.

[silveranimefan]

Today’s manga is “Black Clover” by Yuuki Tabata. A positive is the art style. The character designs are nice. However, the story itself is rather cliche even by Shounen manga standards. Not to mention it moves a bit too fast. I’m all for not spending a million chapters on one story arc, but this series moves so fast that it feels choppy and slapped together. I sorta like the dynamic between Asta and Noelle. The relationship between Asta and Yuno feels like it’s gonna go in a Naruto/Sasuke or Sora/Riku (Kingdom Hearts) kind of direction. I’m on the fence about whether I want to continue with the series or not.

[professor-speedweeb-blog]

A manga you should give a chance: “BLACK CLOVER”

- everything BUT a ripp-off! (This text is as low on spoilers as it was possible)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySZeQBhz71E&t=1s

(link to video I made in connection with this entry)

Usually I tell people to “try out” a manga or “pick one up”, but with this specific case I think another choice of words is necessary.  From what I have seen on MyAnimeList, this manga suffers from a fascinating polarization in the reviews, going from catastrophically bad to astoundingly good.

And I think I know why. One of the biggest points of criticism was the point of ripping of other series like Naruto, Fairy Tail, or even Bleach. So we have a shonen series having shonen tropes. In other news: water is wet, fire is hot, and people die when they are killed.

Given how limited yet binding the tropes of the shonen-genre are, it's not exactly surprising to see the same elements resurface at times. And the series it is accused to have ripped off are the ones that have literally re-shaped and dominated the genre in the last decade, so not much of a surprise or scandal here either.

To be truly original as an author in such a genre there are three possibilities, all being equally legit and not exclusive:

total ignorance of the tropes and avoiding them like the plague

Subversion and then breaking with the tropes, especially where it is not expected

Accepting the tropes and expanding from there

Tabata Yuuki goes for the third approach here. However, for something to expand from you have to establish it first, if you want a work that stands up on itself and doesn't just lean on the genre for a proper understanding. You have to set the base first before you start building upwards, that's common sense.

And this is why in the first few chapters you get flooded by a bunch of tropes and scenes that appear like you have kind of seen them before – and this is why most people who only read the early bits gave it such a horrible score: they flunked out before the author was done setting down the baseline for his own work.

So we have a young naive protagonist, Aster, who is untalented (can't use any magic in this case), but has a big dream of becoming the next Emperor, Heavenly Superperson, Hokage, or whatever. At the same time he has a talented stoic rival that he competes with. And here people accuse the author of ripping of Naruto – however, they couldn't be more wrong.

For one, where Sasuke was an emotionless emo-placefiller, Yuno is way more of a likeable character – and their rivalry is NOTHING like the ones usually seen in shonen stories, where the rivals in question at first hate or at least don't respect each other. For those two it is different: they are literally brothers. They respect and love each other like family and keep looking out for each other. Unlike how most rival constellations start, this is a healthy relationship build around friendly competition.

Also, unlike Naruto, our main protagonist is all but lacking. He may be untalented in what the world considers the most important, but then again he might be one of the physically strongest and fastest characters in the cast, save maybe for some adult characters like Yami. And actually, he's not “untalented” either. A lack of talent implies that it could be compensated with hard work for the same results, which is totally wrong: Aster is unable to ever use magic on a genetic level. At some point in the manga he's also called a “defect”. No matter how hard he works, he will never achieve what everyone else has, that's why he has to work his way up in his own way – raw physical power and his personal gimmick. But primarily physical power.

So even without his anti-magic sword he's a force to be reckoned with. Which brings me to point two of the accusations of stealing ideas: “having a power that is connected to the evil demons”, which can be said to be trope Bleach has made popular. But: I'd claim that the concept of the personal “inner devil” is something so elemental to human storytelling that you can barely fixate it somewhere, on the other hand we don't exactly know if demons in that world are actually evil.

In Bleach it is simple: Hollows are soul eating beasts that need to be exterminated, and Ichigo using Hollow-Power makes him a freakish outcast, always in danger of getting consumed by his own power. But in Black Clover we know almost nothing about demons or devils, or if they are even truly “evil”, and anti-magic is not automatically brought into relation with them either. Aster is just the “odd one out” for not using normal magic.

Which brings me to the next point: people claiming it's a Fairy Tail knock-off because it uses magic and magic battles. First of all that alone sounds stupid, mostly because the concept of magic in fiction predates the creation of Fairy Tail by several thousand years. But even if Black Clover legitimately stole it, I'm happy with it:

Fairy Tail totally failed on delivering an authentic world AND at interesting designs of magic - so Black Clover taking over and actually getting both aspects right might be for the best.

With Fairy Tail it is always the same uninspired elemental powers or the typical gimmicks of the main cast that barely get elaborated on, and just strapping the name “Dragon Slayer” or “God Slayer” on something doesn't exactly change its mundane nature.

And everything else kind of exists at the sidelines but barely gets any relevance. Remember the Fairy Tail guy with the smoke magic? Well even I forgot that he exists. Meanwhile one of the early villains we meet in Black Clover has “Smoke” as a theme and uses it to a fascinating extent, and he's just one of many examples of a creative use of magic.

So now that we have the accusations of specific series out of the picture, let's clean up with the rest of it: the accusation that it is generic in the typical “friendship wins everything” part that shonen often has.

The fascinating part here: countless manga series have “the power of friendship” as a theme. However, those very same manga end every arc with a dramatic and climatic one-vs-one battle between hero and villain, a fight where friends were never needed apart from moral support or maybe for keeping the low-level-enemies busy.

However, in Black Clover things are slightly different: Given the nature of his powers, Aster NEEDS his friends in combat.

He's extremely close ranged with almost zero means of ranged attacks – and that in a world where absolutely everyone with even a speck of magical power can ride on a broom and get the height advantage on him. He lacks defensive skills apart from simple blocking, as well as healing powers. At the same time he cannot keep up with an enemy that has magic that makes them faster than what Aster can physically achieve. And on top of that his offensive powers are limited to one-vs-one combat.

It's not so weird that the magicians-group he's in has a teleportation mage, as well as someone specializing in long range artillery, and someone specialized in water magic AoE that can also be used for shielding – and that's not even accounting for all of the members. Without his friends, Aster wouldn't even have a chance in most fights.

Also under criticism: the “stupid protagonist” as he is common in shonen manga. Well, while Aster's lack of intelligence is certainly undeniable, he's one of the few characters who's actually aware of how stupid he actually is – what doesn't stop him from trying his best anyways, obviously.

There was a line in a recent fighting-chapter that I really liked: “I'm stupid so I can't afford myself to make any mistakes to begin with!” - when I look at the row of overconfident stupid-yet-likeable protagonists we have had in the last years, such self-awareness is really refreshing.

And another point would be the “power-up-through-emotions-and-dedication” trope.  The author actually goes the smart way with that one: he builds such power-ups directly into the empowerment system. Such plot-developments always appear kind of cheesy, but now it feels less like the author is cheating, especially as it is part of the general system it is available to ALL characters, not just the protagonists. Imagine a villain who is so evil, that when pressured, his hatred and greed create new magic mid-fight, a polar opposite to the “hero-powerup”.

This and several other things make me see a lot of potential in this series, maybe even so much that this will one day be part of what the Big Three were in the past.

Now that I have been countering some negative points for the last pages, let me finish this essay with the positive aspects: the characters are refreshing, the world feels authentic, and I personally really like the art-style. As a writer I'm not exactly good at describing art, but I think you could say it is more a “depiction of aesthetics” than a “portrayal of reality in a certain style”.

How do I explain it...  say you want to draw a character. Now in the style of Fairy Tail you'd have a focus on the body, the muscles and/or curves (also explaining why the two main protagonists of that series, Gray and Natsu, are always half-naked when fighting). In Black Clover the focus is instead on the clothing and the whole appearance, resulting in an entirely different style.

The fact that the style of this manga is less suitable for the primitive variant of fan service also is a bonus point for me, albeit a very subjective one. Don't get me wrong, everything has its time and place, but recently things have gotten slightly out of hand in certain series.