(no subject)

[sigmaleph]

so i finished the first... season? half season? 13-episode-batch? of shaman king 2021

I talked before about the pace being much faster than the 2001 anime. Comparing episode summaries, it's approximately twice as fast (the last episode, however, brings up a plot point that should've happened much later; probably this means they're skipping a bunch of the "wandering aimlessly across America trying to find the Patch" parts. I think some of those were anime-only filler but i'm not certain, my manga re-read hasn't reached that point. they can't be skipping everything that happens there because that'd mean no Lyserg, though, so some of it is doing stuff out of order.)

one of the consequences of the sped up pace is that it really highlights one of the more annoying plot inconsistencies of Shaman King: Yoh learns that oversouls exist in episode 5, and Tamao shows that she already has one by episode 8.

Early shaman king is all about soul integration: you find the ghost of a dead human and borrow their skills. When the shaman fight begins, though, we learn it's all about taking a spirit and making it possess a physical object to manifest an oversoul.

let's be clear: "materialising a unique magical weapon out of sheer willpower" is an excellent trope. i love it. it's great. i would probably not be a shaman king fan if i didn't think that was the coolest shit ever when i first watched the anime at 13 or 14.

but it's also a lot more... standard-shonen-y compared to the idea of solving your problems by borrowing skills from dead people. there's a fascinating story you could tell from the latter, early shaman king (particularly early manga) looks like it's setting up that story, and then it isn't and the rest of the plot is an extended tournament arc fought with the aforementioned magic weapons. there's power level indicators and everything.

(side note, but this is also around the time the focus in spirits shifts from ghosts to nature spirits and mythological creatures and so on. it makes a lot more sense that you'd want to borrow skills from a samurai than from a tanuki)

Anyway. Point is, Yoh arrives in Funbari Hill having no idea what an oversoul is despite having trained as a shaman since birth and being the heir of one of the biggest shaman families in Japan. He has to figure it out on the fly when he's fighting Silva and it turns out it's the basis of the entire shaman fight.

and then we look at Tamao, who is not the Asakura heir and merely an apprentice, and she totally knows how to create an oversoul. Because everyone does, because that's what the show is about now. Did she figure it out while Yoh was away? Was Yohmei like "oh, finally, Yoh's gone, now I can teach you the basic technique every shaman knows that I've been keeping from my grandson for no clear reason"?

this is, incidentally, very much analogous to when hunter x hunter introduces nen and you start wondering why exactly did the Zoldycks not teach it to Killua

(to be clear, this problem predates the 2021 anime, the compressed timeline just makes it somewhat more salient and gives me a reason to talk about it)