Yes, I've been quite bad at finding time for this blog. Now, the good news is that as far as I know, and I say this with the full knowledge that this is tempting fate to an unreasonable and extremely dangerous degree, things have settled down some, and I'll be able to turn my attention back to this blog. Even so, the future holds many mysteries for those brave enough to peer into its opaque depths, and as pointed out, fate has been tempted, and may yet rise to the challenge.

In any case, to further cement this blog's as-yet-nascent reputation for being a CCS-centric blog (through no deliberate decision on my part, I assure you), I should probably ramble a bit (albeit a bit unfavourably) about the series many people seem to expect me to like for its featuring of CCS characters, except not really: Tsubasa Chronicle.

Now, Tsubasa Chronicle, for those who aren't aware, has alternate-universe versions of Sakura and Syaoran from CCS, as well as a couple of original characters (and Mokona from Magic Knight Rayearth), travel around the multiverse looking for Sakura's memories, which are represented by her feathers. There's a lot of other subplots that will turn into uberplots mixed in there, but this isn't really the place to ennumerate all of them.

So I've been asked, a great many times, whether I like Tsubasa Chronicle. "It's by CLAMP," they say. "You'll like it."

Then I mention that I've already seen it, and that I'm not so much a CLAMP fan as simply quite specifically a Card Captor Sakura fan.

"Well, you should still like it," they insist. "The characters from Card Captor Sakura are in there."

Upon which I respond that I do not, in fact, like TC, because I am, as mentioned, a CCS fan rather than a CLAMP fan, and TC is not CCS 2.0.

"That should be obvious," they admonish. "The characters are their own, rather than from CCS."

So basically, I am expected to like a show because it has characters that are almost entirely unlike those from a show that I do profess to like. The logic involved in this argument escapes me, although I'd probably benefit from simple words and colourful diagrams that don't take up more than a hundred kilobytes in size and won't break the page formatting. (Yes, I know how a certain variety of commenter tends to troll.)

This, obviously, is not to say that TC is bad overall, although I have to question the quality of certain individual episodes, especially in the second season. It's just that, putting aside the whole story structure of dimension-hopping and solving problems along the way that has earned it the nickname of "CLAMPdom Hearts", TC took pretty much most of the aspects of the CCS characters which I liked, and removed them. Whatever they replaced it with, they're not really as interesting or relevant to my tastes.

Sakura Kinomoto in CCS is an active, creative, cheerful little girl, the sort who springs out of the screen and grabs your attention with her cuteness and her sheer energy. She's not as loud as Haruhi Suzumiya, but one gets the feeling that whatever she does, she does with gusto, with all of her being.

Sakura in TC, by comparison, is just kind of… there. She has her preternatural luck and likability, but almost all the energy is gone, and she's more or less reduced, as far as I can tell, to being sort of a living prop, background scenery in the foreground. Occasionally the story requires her to be dressed up in some fancy clothes, so I suppose she can also be considered a cosplay model or something. But without a Tomoyo influence, the cosplay is distant and somewhat lacklustre. It's the difference between, say, seeing a really nice dress on a store mannequin, and seeing that dress on your girlfriend. (Or some other sartorial analogy that I may be blanking on at the moment.)

And Syaoran, for all his main character status, is little better. Gone is the perpetually-scowling boy tasked to retrieve the Clow Cards and getting into a rivalry with the chosen Cardcaptor, with the antagonism quickly melting away with the realization of his feelings, but none of the determination and, I will have to admit to being biased here, lack of angst. Syaoran in CCS was not afraid to speak his mind, and although what he did say may not be what he truly felt, at least he said it loud and clear. In TC, he's turned into, well, the stereotypical romantic bishoujo anime male lead, who's very kind and very polite but doesn't actually seem to have a personality apart from being nice to everyone he meets. This is not, in another character, necessarily a horrible trait, but in Syaoran, it's simply Not The Same.

The characters in CCS, for lack of a better term, exist. In TC, they're more like vaguely-formed concepts, tour guides for the various wonders of the Steam-Grommet factory that is CLAMP's multiverse. I can't imagine Sakura in TC going out to capture a rogue magical construct like a Clow Card; she might be a kind of passive AoE inspirational buff to the party, but she doesn't appear to have any, well, initiative.

I've read ahead for spoilers, and I do realize that all this can be explained by various plot points in the story; for example, Sakura's doormat status can be rationalized as having her memory feathers all scattered throughout every single CLAMP world and their close neighbours. But that doesn't really change the fact that now, at this moment in time in the story, there is nothing that will interest me in the characters, and I've already decided that thus far, I'm not that interested in the plot. Again, not bad, but not to my tastes.

If the story should turn to something that makes me jump out of my seat in fist-pumping excitement and anticipation, or if the characters were to suddenly regain some of their old fire (this is entirely possible, since one of the basic premises of TC is that people are mostly the same in every dimension, unless some life-changing event hadn't occured or something), I may well pick up the series, whether manga or anime, again. Until then, however, I've resigned myself to carefully repeating the same answers to every question about why I don't appear to like Tsubasa Chronicle even if Card Captor Sakura is my absolute favourite anime of all time.

Occasionally I wonder whether it's the random ramblings like this or the episode-centric not-really-summaries and not-quite-thoughts that attract people to this blog. And then I realize that it probably doesn't matter anyway, and I'll still be writing these unfeasibly long entries either way.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 26th, 2007 at 5:37 pm and is filed under card captor sakura, ramblings, tsubasa chronicle. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.