Normal City
a review by casivea
a review by casivea
I am very impressed with this manhwa for going from a teenagers-in-a-high-school setting to on-the-run-fugitive-chase-scenes without missing a beat or falling off track. I am not an attentive person and I lack the focus needed to binge things━as a result, I've only ever binged five things in my life. This is that fifth thing, taking up six hours of my life from eleven at night yesterday to four in the morning today.
This manhwa's strength is in it's ability to make all of these story transitions believable without taking the reader out of the immersion. None of the characters in Normal City are good people━darling protagonist Mars Haven takes the cake for ruthlessness about three volumes into the story. But they're honest, and never lie about who they are. As such, I am not shocked when the situation goes from worse to even worse. It is to be expected when each of the central characters sets in place their own vice to later fuel important story outcomes.
The story starts off with an inductroduction to Mars Haven, a sixteen year old girl from Mars, and her two best friends, Sion and Jean, traveling down from Mars to live in Normal City, the series' namesake. The trio are ESPers━people treated as inhuman for their psychic abilities and placed under the care of an organization until they are deemed worthy to be "freemen" and live openly in society at the cost of freely using their psychic powers. The scene that kicks off the story is the introduction of a new team member━a teenage ESPer by the name of Isha Green, and the team's first male member.
I want to emphasize several things about Isha Green. One, that he is considered to be one of the more boring characters in the story. Two, that this detail is not a deal-breaker because he serves his purpose in the story well. Three, the reason why I emphasize that Isha is male is not because I am implying that Mars and friends becomes a big love fest, but because gender is a central part of the theme and a big part of why this manhwa stood out to me as being different from other stories I've read like this.
See, every member of Mars’ trio has a different approach to femininity. Mars is a hotheaded woman who moves forward on her own. Jean is boy-crazy and more traditionally feminine. Sion is consistently mistaken for being a pretty boy and laments her desire to be taken more seriously as a woman. In contrast, Isha is a pretty boy, one of many pretty boys in the series that “has a complex about that kind of thing”.
Mars is different from other ESPers in that she has an ability unrelated to being an esper━she can walk into other people’s dreams, and has been doing so since she was a child. When she is first introduced to Isha Green, she is shell-shocked━the two of them had been visiting each other in their dreams for years prior to their first encounter.
There’s only one problem. Isha doesn’t recognize her━because when Mars was meeting with Isha, she was doing it in the form of her male counterpart, Gai.
Mars is a man-made ESPer, made from the combination of various DNA. Assigned Kitty 101 at birth, she is later given the name Mars by her adopted father, a scientist who helped create her and later ran away with her due to her resemblance to his dead infant daughter. As a result of her DNA, Mars turns into a cis man for a few days every month and has thus grown up alienated from the concept of gender and afraid to let her friends know of her true existence.
I’m not going to pretend that Normal City’s approach to gender is invigorating and exciting. It is tired and dull━something that makes sense, given the fact that this was written in the 90s. Western LGBT audiences might roll their eyes at some of the choices made in this manhwa, from the casual jokes about gayness to the characters’ inability to accept that they might not be 100% heterosexual. It is period accurate, for sure, but what shocks in particular about this manhwa is the things that aren’t said.
For a manhwa that has so many jokes like “you guys are so close, are you gays?” (I swear there’s one of these every volume) there is a surprising amount of emphasis placed on same-sex relationships. Furthermore, a lot of these same-sex relationships are treated as being infinite and important━something even queer stories today have a problem with sometimes. As a gay woman, I am often left to read stories where queer women (especially lesbians, who are disliked by heterosexual authors for being unable to be paired with a man) are treated as the secondary relationship, a partnership that pales in comparison to the dominant male/female pairing.
In a way, the author plays a perpetual game of gotcha with her audience. I wouldn’t be so hesitant to call the story overt queerbait if it were not for the fact that the author emphasizes her same-sex relationships as being as real as her heterosexual ones
After this point, I’m going to be really heavy on spoilers and they will be largely untagged, so keep that in mind.
Sion is Mars’s best friend. She is mistaken for being a man by several characters in the story and she emphasizes that she is a woman constantly to anyone listening. She and Mars have a teasing relationship, where Sion plays man and Mars plays woman━an inside joke for both of them seeing as neither particular fit their perceived gender role well (note that Sion is not initially aware of Gai but is understanding when she finds out━showcasing the strength of the pair’s relationship). Sion states constantly that “she is not a lez” (as the translators translated it), and like Isha with his constant barrage of “I’m a normal man that likes women”, they both achieve verbal heteronormativity.
However, none of this changes the fact that despite what the author eventually ends up writing, Sion and Mars are the true, undying love of the story. Look no further than the image used for the cover of this manga on this very site━the only cover of this manhwa that doesn’t feature Mars (or Mars+Gai) is a picture of Mars and Sion. They are the unresolved pair, the destined duo, the never-fulfilled tragedy that haunts all the characters alive by the end of the story. For a manhwa that treats character death as simply a casualty of the world they are in (spoiler: a character’s sibling dies in front of them and they don’t even react), the tone of the story shifts into angst whenever Sion’s unfortunate demise is brought up. The characters mourn her━the author mourns her. Characters more sympathetic than Sion are not given the narrative focus that she is given.
This isn’t to say that other relationships in the story don’t exist or aren’t given primary focus. Isha and Mars are the main pair that are together by the end of the story━and yet none of this takes away from the way the author breathes life into Sion and Mars’s relationship, even in the wake of both characters’ eventual demise. I am not giving descriptions of them justice, but as I stated earlier, I don’t expect authors to treat relationships between women, especially romantic ones, with respect. It never happens. However, the entirety of the story is spent with other characters emphasizing the bond Sion and Mars have. The way it is was clearly “more than friends”. The unresolved feelings between them that couldn’t be━not because Mars and Sion are both women, but because Mars despises herself, despises the fact that she is both a woman and a man, despises the fear that Sion and Jean will leave her if she is true to herself. For a manhwa that makes so many jokes about characters being gay based off stereotypes, no one jokes about the intensity of Sion and Mars’s relationship. It is recognized as being as true as every other relationship in the story, even the ones between Mars and a man.
Part of this is just that the author herself makes these jokes for comedy but is hypocritical about them in execution. Isha Green is a pretty boy that “clearly likes girls like a normal man” but finds his never-ending love in Gai, Mars’s male counterpart. The relationship between Isha and Gai is the other same-sex pairing in the narrative that is given full attention. They are treated as consuming, worthy, and bonded-by-destiny. The bond between Gai and Isha is explored in a way that is less sensitive, to say, than Sion and Mars━but it is still treated as being a pairing where both of them care for the other.
I will say that the execution of Isha and Gai’s relationship leaves much to be desired. Isha’s “I like girls like a normal man” comments aside, the story makes it pretty clear by the middle half that Isha and Gai’s relationship is just supposed to be an extension of his eventual pairing with Mars━I have a pretty big issue with this. I suppose this is the author’s answer to the overhanging question of “are Mars and Gai the same person?”, but it fails in execution to me because the bond between Mars and Isha by the end is still heavily reliant on Isha’s feelings for Gai and vice-versa (this point is important to me, especially when I recall how Mars had an identity crisis one of the middle volumes over recognizing that Gai had feelings for Isha that she simply did not━calling into question her identity as both Mars AND Gai). Unfortunately, the story decides that Mars and Gai are, essentially, the same person and Isha is a normal heterosexual boy that liked a girl that he just saw as being a boy for most of his life. Cool.
I nitpick, but Mars and Gai are very interesting as character(s). Aside from my complaints about the way their relationship with Isha is handled, their existence as a pair provides for a lot of reflection for the reader. Similar stories that handle this kind of dynamic (like Ranma ½) emphasize that the male and female counterpart are the same person. Although Mars identifies as a woman (both through presentation and through verbal longing), she is not sure of who she is as a man. She is separated from her womanhood in a way that Sion, her masculine friend, is not. She wonders if she can be a human being at all because she is both a man and a woman. I found this to be an interesting dilemma on her part━her worry that a lack of clear gender (and I guess being manmade) makes her inhuman. This visually contrasts well with the fact that the cast is made up with so many characters who are mistaken for being a sex that they are not.
As someone who also struggles with gender identity, Mars is very relatable and I can sympathize with her confusion. The part of her that is Gai sees the world differently that than the part of her that is Mars (although she laments the way women treat her when she is Gai━one of the best parts of being a woman is interacting with other women, after all). Her struggle and resulting existential chaos form a huge part of the narrative’s lesson by the end of the story━what does it mean to be human? What makes Isha Green more human than Mars Haven for being born naturally? Can someone who is born naturally be human truly? Is someone who is not human deserving of love?
The story actually attempts to answer this question with each of Mars’s love interests━her defining partner, Sion; the light of her life, Isha; and her biological partner, Venus. Isha and Sion set Mars apart as being human. In the process of loving them, Mars becomes someone who is not Kitty 101, someone who is not just the lab experiment that Dr. Troll created. Isha, less so, due to his DNA being a part of Kitty 101 (the story emphasizes that destiny means nothing to some characters, but everything to others). Venus is the narrative’s symbolic perfect man━an amusing twist seeing as he is named after the (female) deity of beauty, while Mars, his destined partner, is named after the (male) deity of war. In a way, their dynamic is interesting because we are used to seeing it with the genders switched. Venus lies back in the shadows, never interfering while laying his claim on Mars from afar, while Mars jumps into battle on her own, and picks imperfect people over Venus in the end.
Venus’s partnership with Mars would eventually imply that Mars is not human. That her (breeding) with Venus like she is supposed to means that she has fulfilled the role she is created for and was never a human being to begin with. She existed as a tool for Dr. Troll to use from the beginning. Mars fights this though, at the climax of the story. She sends Dr. Troll her past memories by projecting her dreams━she shows him the people she has loved as Mars (Sion and Jean) and the people she has loved as Gai (Isha). These experiences she has had on her own, in absence of his interference, proves that she is sincerely a human being.
Dr. Troll thereby exists as a symbolic god, the one who made Venus and Mars and the one who asked them to play the roles they were given. Make no mistake, the narrative asks you to see Mars as being a woman, but never downgrades her talents or masculine sense of style (ex: her ruthless demeanor and intimidating presence is something normally allotted to bounty hunter-style characters in sci-fi stories like these). Sion is masculine but is seen as being a woman as well as being the only character worth mourning by the entire cast. The manhwa initially treats Isha’s affection for Gai as being humorous, but they are eventually given full-center and given the same romantic context as Venus/Mars and Isha/Mars. In doing so, the manhwa presents deviance from gender roles as being correct and necessary in order to beat the big bad━a cruel, misogynist scientist who adores gender roles while fixating on eugenics.
The story ends with a tear-jerking twist, one that makes sense if you’ve read the entire story and understood what vice about each character lead to the ending. Although the story primarily focuses on Mars’s and Isha’s (as well as Venus’s and Jean’s) struggles with who they are, the author asks the audience to look at themselves as well. What makes a bond love and what makes a bond dependence? Is it not okay to be selfish and self-centered if it means no one else gets hurt? Most importantly, the author asks if she was right to end the story the way she did. Is Mars Haven a human being? What would it mean if she were not?
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