Ohio gozaimassu, and welcome to my read-through of Bakuman Chapter 127: Hot-Blooded and Total Defeat, in which I am annoyed. Very annoyed.

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Hot-Blooded and Total Defeat Summary

I LOST!!

Continuing from the previous chapter, Nanamine is in fits of hysterical laughter at his utter defeat. Finally admitting to himself that he lost.

He laughs comically at his annihilation and seeks confirmation from Kosugi about how absolutely wrecked he is. He curses, slams his laptop onto the floor, and has a breakdown like a fucking baby.

He admits he thought the idea would work. Kosugi brings some cold, hard reality: you can’t just create something by bringing a bunch of people together. If he wants to make a team, it has to be small and tightly curated with responsible, talented people. Even that would be a challenge for a newbie like himself.

Nanamine tells Kosugi to shove it and lord it over his face now that he’s seen the results.

Meanwhile, at the studio, Hattori gives them the—not quite good—news about the situation. Hattori points out that, after all is said and done, the better person won. Saiko hopes that Nanamine has seen the error of his ways while he looks at the fan mail that a much younger Nanamine sent to them.

Saiko is, appropriately, distraught at how someone who just wanted to surpass them went so far astray.

Shujin is skeptical that he’ll change his mind so easily. Hattori reminds them that it’s not their concern but Kosugi’s, and he’s in charge of dealing with the boy.

The Narcissist Playbook

At Nanamine’s studio, Nanamine opts to quit. He opines that he only *really* cared about Classroom of Truth, which he was able to take his time on, and he’s had enough.

Kosugi is furious. His series isn’t over yet, and Nanamine promised to start over again with him if he lost.

Rookie mistake with a narcissist, my friend. However, we’re in a shonen manga, so let’s see what happens.

Nanamine points out – unfortunately correctly – that he lost badly and is definitely going to be canned in the next serialization meeting.

Kosugi, however, resists the defeatism: the meeting is at the end of the month, and subsequent chapters will also be considered. If he can raise his rank before the next chapter, he won’t necessarily be canceled. It’s too soon to give up. Nanamine – with his smug, punchable face — doesnt see how that could possibly happen.

His advisors are gone because of Nakai (uh huh); Nakai is fired, and there is no one to create manga with.

Kosugi is, like, literally right there, bro. And he says at much. Nanamine is confident that Kosugi will never bring up his rank. He then goes on: with his rankings in 16th and 19th place, he expects to get the same ranking in issue 7. He literally cannot fall any lower. But he also knows, for a fact, that working with Kosugi will not bring him up.

Kosugi counters: he’s never tried, so he doesn’t know.

He knows. And anyway, he doesn’t want to do anything degrading. He decides to end the series there.

Kosugi refuses to let this lie: there are countless rookies who would kill for a spot in Jump but fail to do so. Nanamine rationalizes that he’s helping a rookie out by opening up a space by quitting the magazine.

Kosugi grabs Nanamine by the collar.

AND FUCKING SOCKS HIM KAPOW.

LET’S FUCKIN GOOOOO.

Nanamine asks politely what the fuck bro? and Kosugi explains: he hates Nanamine as a person, but he never hated his ambition to get to the top. It’s one of his few admirable traits.

Agree to disagree.

Nanamine calls Kosugi an “abusive editor” who has resorted to violence because he can’t convince him with words.

Yo, Kosugi, let me have a go at him?

Nanamine threatens to call the authorities and have Kosugi arrested, or he could just sue him. Feeling like he has nothing to lose, Nanamine makes threats to sue Kosugi after his disgrace since it’s no big deal. It will ruin Kosugi’s career, cancel his work, and cause him to be fired.

Kosugi thinks it’s a great idea.

I’m Your Editor

THEN SOCKS HIM AGAIN. WHAM.

That’s very satisfying.

Kosugi yells at him to call the police. He grabs him and shakes him. Begs the little shit to do it. Nanamine pulls out his phone.

But then drops it. He won’t become a laughingstock of the internet because of Kosugi.

Kosugi points out that the internet has done all his work so far. Why not use it to end both of them as well? Finish the job, hmmm?

I love this. Kosugi, you are a savage.

Nanamine is convinced his career is over no matter what, so there’s no point. Kosugi yells at him that he won’t let it end, and it’s not over. He reminds Nanamine that, at the end of the day, he is still a talented mangaka who created the premise for Classroom of Truth. He has it in him. He did the artwork, too.

Nanamine keeps it up: He has time to work on it. He only came up with the idea of “if you lie, you get killed,” and he is clueless about everything else. That’s why he copies other manga and uses people on the internet for ideas.

Kosugi admits that it was wrong of him to do so, but he’s disgusted that his passion and guts have seemingly evaporated. Nanamine is convinced that it’s all done. Kosugi is still on his side. They can start over from scratch.

Kosugi decides that he will not go home until Nanamine agrees to work with him.

Nanamine accuses him of battery and false imprisonment. He’s insane. Nanamine’ll go crazy if he stays with a weirdo like him. Kosugi remains adamant: he will not leave until Kosugi is allowed to work with him. He bars the entry to the door. Nanamine’s bemused by Kosugi’s efforts and calls him out for only pretending to be a hot-blooded editor. But that isn’t popular these days.

Meta.

Kosugi disagrees: he wants Shonen, manga grittier, and sweatier.

Nanamine says they’re not good match, and he doesn’t want that kind of manga. Asks him to move aside. Kosugi tells him he will have to knock him out of the way if he wants to leave. Nanamine wants Kosugi to stop acting tough. It’s meaningless and besides, Kosugi hates him. Why bother?

Because Kosugi is his fucking editor.

Mic drop.

A Change of Heart

At 2:38 in the morning, Kosugi falls asleep, and Nanamine mulls over his options. He’s certain Kosugi will stay until Monday unless he agrees to work with him.

He then notices that Kosugi is out like a light. He thinks he’s an idiot and decides to head home. But as he opens the door, he remembers the chat room’s harsh words and Kosugi’s faith in him.

He looks back and makes a decision.

Kosugi wakes up to find Nanamine has disappeared. He assumes the worst until Nanamine walks in with some tea and tells him to shut up.

He provides Kosugi with a storyboard. Kosugi is surprised and thrilled. He reads the storyboard and gives him some easy-to-implement notes, and he’ll be fine. He assures Nanamine that he is totally capable of doing this on his own. Nanamine is more blase about the quality (obviously). He’s confident he’ll be canceled, but he’ll do the work on his own until then. Kosugi should have nothing to complain about, right?

Nanamine also doesn’t want to hear anything more from an editor who said some cool things only to fall asleep and orders him to go. He changes his mind and leaves on his own.

Total Defeat

On Monday, January 11th, the boys attend the New Year’s party, and Saiko is nervous about running into Nanamine. Shujin doesn’t care: they won.

Meanwhile, Aoki and Yoshida are giving Hiramaru instructions on how to behave in the part: don’t call Aoki by her pet name and don’t drink. Hiramaru doesn’t understand why they’re singling him out; they’re acting like a married couple.

At that moment he has another idea for his manga.

Jesus.

Miura, meanwhile, is trying to talk Iwase off the ledge for a romance story: Aoki and Hiramaru are both doing romances after the love fest. Iwase will not be deterred. She wants to do another series. Miura reminds her that the anime for +Natural is concluding in March and that she needs to make sure her series’s popularity doesn’t tank.

Shujin and Saiko are both glad to see business as usual for everyone. They’re also more than a little miffed at Fukuda celebrating the anime for Road Racer Giri.

Takahama gives them the old “Hisashiburdana” and lets them know Mikata of Justice is being turned into a TV drama. They congratulate him on his success. The series is more conducive to a drama than an anime.

They recognize that all their friends are doing well. Fukuda and Takayama may soon be beating them in the rankings. Shujin announces that he’s going to put off his plans to have a baby for the time being.

I’m sorry wat.

When Saiko plays the audience, he explains that he’s getting out of college and he’s going to have his driver’s license soon, so it’s about time. When asked for advice, Saiko points out that he doesn’t know what to do because of his (dumb) circumstances.

At that moment Shujin sees Nanamine. He’s thin. Kosugi walks up to them and thanks them for agreeing to join his plot. Nanamine is thinking about quitting manga rather than making amends.

Nanamine asks what he’s whispering about and greets Ashirogi. They wish him a good evening.

He admits total defeat. PCP utterly beat him despite his best efforts.

However, the next time they see him, he’ll beat them with a brand new method. Kosugis is glad to hear that Nanamine has not given up yet.

Ashirogi—playing the good rivals—let him know that they have no intention of going quietly into that good night and that they’ll always stay above him as a goal to aim for. They put their hand out to shake.

He refuses and decides to leave the party. Kosugi is alarmed: The part hasn’t even begun. Nanamine was only there to tell Ashirogi that he would beat them.

As the chapter concludes, he walks off confidently, looking just the slightest bit better, with Kosugi going after him.

Hot-Blooded and Total Defeat Reaction

Sigh

Alright, I’m of two extremely distinct yet mixed opinions on this conclusion to this arc.

First, Ohba nailed the absolute, ball-clenching annoyance that is dealing with a narcissist when they have to confront defeat.

And Second, Ohba was probably told that he couldn’t push Nanamine off the stage forever.

Now, I don’t know what actually happened—I wasn’t there, and my Japanese is only sub-intermediate—but the fact that Nanamine is not definitively canceled and seems to have made some kind of reform tells me, to my frustration, that someone told them, “No, you cannot end this character’s arc like this. He has to be redeemed through Jump’s Masthead.”

And I say this not because it’s necessarily what happened but because this is a VERY common trope in Shonen manga, especially from Shonen Jump.

The most famous example of this – and the one that gets uniquely clowned on – is the fights between Pain, Madura, and Naruto from Naruto. Those fights feature some truly heinous characters, but through the power of Naruto’s ability to de-escalate a situation after a literal fucking war, he’s able to redeem these characters to some extent before their utter defeat.

Now, I’m actually okay with this trope in theory. Even though I’ve been very, ahem, annoyed by Nanamine as a character because of my own experiences with Narcissists, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t deserve another shot. As I noted in the previous chapter, he’s kind of pathetic, and if you get right down to it, his behavior, while potentially toxic, doesn’t make him less human or less worthy of being treated as such.

But narratively, it feels like a cop-out.

Now, given that Bakuman’s tone has never been particularly dark – at least not to this extent, not even in the dumbest arc, the hospital arc – it was probably too much for me to assume that they’d go to the full deep end and take Nanamine out of the game in the most unceremonious way imaginable.

But I’m still frustrated. Especially since it really makes this whole stretch feel a bit more like a sampler rather than something that Bakuman would be willing to commit to.

Usually, I’m okay with the pastiche element of this series because of the metafiction (everyone’s favorite word. Are you sick of it yet?), but in this case, it’s not right.

But the other thing is.

As far as this could be handled, it was handled well

So even though I’m annoyed that they pulled a shonen jump climax rather than a morally grey one, I will say that the whole sequence of Nanamine’s defeat and confrontation with Kosugi is a masterclass depicting a narcissist after they’ve lost.

Or maybe someone with Borderline Personality Disorder.

It’d be a perfect time to remind the audience, again, that I am not a clinician, nor am I planning to be one anytime soon. I do not have clinical indices to diagnose this. I just have a lot of experience with fucking narcissistic assholes.

And they are personally responsible for some trauma I’m still working through. And I’m really upset that I let myself get exploited by them on the assumption that they were decent people capable of change and growth. They weren’t. They used me. And I’m paying the price.

But my bugaboos aside, if a narcissist were to lose this badly, you can bet your left tit (or nut) that this is how they’d respond to defeat because I’ve had almost word for word this exact experience with one.

They never take the L. They can’t. It’s not in their mental framework. So the fact that Nanamine is petulant and blames everyone but himself for his defeat throughout 90% of the chapter was so painfully true that I didn’t feel remotely bad when Kosugi socked him not once but twice. KAPOW.

So satisfying. So so satisfying.

But yeah, the way Ohba captures the Narcissist’s rationalization is fucking masterful: no, I never cared about it anyway. Everyone’s an idiot. Not keeping promises made in exchange for help and manipulating a situation to escalate it as a threat against future pain. It was frustrating in a very real way.

And even though I’m still salty about it, Nanamine’s nominative change to the light—to the extent that it’s possible—was a very believable turn, specifically because he doesn’t give an inch when turning.

Even when he finally lets Kosugi’s guts penetrate, he’s still petulant and childish about it. So, while it’s frustrating that they had to go this route, at least they did a good job about it.

And even though I was 100% right about Nanamine, I was.

Absolutely Wrong about Kosugi

In many ways, Kosugi is more of the protagonist of this arc than the actual protagonist because he’s the one who is changed most by the experience. While I was upset by his seeming cowardice at the beginning, Kosugi really proved himself to be a capable foil to Nanamine’s insanity. And on re-assessment, my feelings towards Kosugi are much warmer (generic shonen battle stuff aside) because…

He’s acting like one would actually act in the face of a narcissist.

Yeah. There is a bit of familiarity breeding contempt. But unlike me, he sticks to his guns even when shit gets dark. He’s not afraid of Nanamine, and he holds fast to his beliefs. That takes massive cojones. When he finally calls out Nanamine’s bluffs, he wants him to call the cops on him. That’s hard as fuck. Man.

So, I misread his character. He’s not the pathetic cuckold that the story makes him out to be. He’s just in a shitty situation, and he has to learn to stand up for himself.

Do I think this will continue into the future? Maybe, maybe not. Since Nanamine is not officially canceled at the end of this chapter, I have to assume he will return at some point – Nakai fucking did – and that he will pose a threat to the boys again with his new method of being a traditional mangaka or some bullshit.

At that point, it’s unclear whether Kosugi will return as a more experienced badass or become a pathetic flunky for Nanamine.

Because manga has one thing about it that’s often overlooked, and that’s that characters CAN change but often revert to their old habits once it’s narratively important to return to the status quo.

We see this most aggressively with Miura. He is a Character so fucking awful he hasn’t changed basically at all, except for the one time he brought up humor. That was made into a moment where he was a badass. But now he’s fumbling the bag with Iwase, and he’s still focused on all the wrong things, and it’s absolutely infuriating.

So, I don’t know if these changes with Kosugi will stick, but I really hope they do.

Anyway, let’s focus on some other stuff in this chapter, like:

The New Year Party and Saiko

Aside from the obvious grace note for this arc, I do like these little get-togethers that show how everybody is progressing. But yeah, I would be lying if I said this particular New Year’s party wasn’t hitting me the same way it’s hitting the boys.

That feeling of being behind is super real. Especially when you see people like fucking Hiramaru womaning up and moving on in the world. Or your assistants are getting an adaptation. Or your rivals. It was played for a laugh, but the boys are the victims of the narrative they’re in: They can’t get everything they want just yet because it’s not narratively there for them. They will, but it’s going to take longer, and everyone around them will be moving on before they do.

I was surprised to see Shujin wanting a baby. But I guess it has been almost a decade narratively since they started writing manga, and Shujin is well along his own personal path because his desire for anime isn’t actively impeding his dating life because he’s not a fucking goober.

But the person I’m really feeling for is Saiko, for the same reason this chapter frustrates me. I feel like him most of all.

It’s interesting to me that, as the series has developed, Saiko has become the heart of the series’ emotional core. I mean, he’s genuinely compassionate towards everyone, even the bastards, and has a selfless streak. Now, he is the hero, so this makes sense, but compared to Shujin, he seems to be the most earnest of the bunch.

Which makes how specifically far behind he is relative to everyone else hurt just a little bit more. I feel him the most of all. Because I want to go much further along in my goals, and I’m not. And it’s no longer because I’m willfully holding myself back. It’s because of things totally outside my control.

Yet I still take it personally, and I still feel bad for being jealous. When people I care about do badly, or people I hate do worse, I still feel bad for them.

The narcissist who has inspired this unholy diatribe is someone I knew only briefly. He was manipulative, loved bombing, and was very charming. And he convinced me to spend money I didn’t have and do things I didn’t want to do. He imperiled my health and well-being, then got angry when I fell short of his expectations.

But he was not the first narcissist I’d dealt with. We were only acquainted for a short time because I recognized that he was one quick, made a rapid diplomatic exit, and cut him out of my life.

But if I had let him stay in my life, I would have been sucked to his level, and I would have been sucked dry. I shudder to think how much I would have harmed myself if I had let his corrosive influence affect me.

And yet, a few months ago, while I was doing some film stuff with a friend, I saw him on the street. He did not look well. He looked worn down, tired, and a little homeless. Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t. Based on what I knew of him, it wouldn’t shock me.

But fuck me, I felt bad about it. I felt that my departure was somehow responsible. Even though he self-destructed because he engaged in openly self-destructive behavior, I still felt an ounce of compassion for him.

So, seeing Saiko being busted up about this whole situation hit. Becuase I felt the same way. I felt like I was seeing myself in him. And in Nanamine in some perverse way.

I’m really mixed about how this all shook out, but as far as these things go, I think I feel the way I need to.

And that’s about as good as I can hope for.

Stray Thoughts

—+Natural’s anime is ending, and Miura is warning Iwase about it. I wonder if this is significant.

–Everyone’s doing well, man. What the fuck?

–The answer this story comes to re: The Chatroom is a bit of a copout, but it’s the correct answer: you can use others to help tell your story – that’s what writing workshops are – but you have to trust them. You can’ blindly take a bunch of notes and expect it to work. I could have talked about that in this series of posts. But honestly, this is a big thing in the film industry too.

You can sometimes have too many producers or execs interfere with a story until it’s a shell of its former self. But because they are producers, you have to take notes and make them work. It’s why some movies that have a lot of potential end up bombing so hard. Ultimately, trusting your instincts and implementing the notes you are given in the most effective way possible are part of the job.

So yeah.

Anyway, this makes me feel weird, so I’m going to take a walk.

I wonder what’s next for the series.

Until next time,

Peace