Manga-Review & Recommendation: Gunslinger Girl - The Power of Hope

The girl has a mechanical body. 

However, she is still an adolescent child.

Italy - sunny days, beautiful landscapes, old cities ... But the superficial appearance is deceptive: a war is raging behind the facade. And fighting is done with all means. A terrorist organization called “Republicans” is trying to overthrow the government. They are fought by the “State Society for Social Welfare”. Behind this inconspicuous name, however, hides a special troop of secret agents: young girls trained in a wide variety of weapons and optimized through surgical interventions. These girls are killers who are being used for dirty affairs by the authorities. They don't seem to mind killing. Seem. Because despite all the cyborg technology in their bodies, they are still children and not emotionless fighting machines.

Triela, Henrietta, Angelica, Rico and Claes - each of these innocent little creatures has its own tragic story.


In my top 11 list of the best manga of all time, Gunslinger Girl also found a place on the podium, more precisely at the third place. The only really known work to date by the author Yu Aida may be a classic that is valued by fans, but the big spotlight was always denied to this franchise - Gunslinger Girl has disappeared in the sand of time. This could also be related to the fact that this series is demanding, uncomfortable, and psychologically profound, unlike what one might expect from the description. Today I would like to take the time to write about why Gunslinger Girl is one of the most impressive experiences I have had in my life, and why everyone, Manga reader or not, should take a look.

The story - Not what’s expected

"Is a girl with a mechanical body ordinary? I'm super strong and can kill a man with my bare hands. I do bleed, but the pain goes away fast. Since I'm a cyborg and have to protect Jose ... I can't be an ordinary girl. "

If you read through a short synopsis of Gunslinger Girl or even let the title melt on your tongue, you get clear associations: Small, cute girls with big guns kicking terrorists ass. Fat action entertainment that plays with clichés and expectations and contrasts the cute children with their brutality in killing.

1A Hollywood cinema, bang bang!
You guessed it - Gunslinger Girl is exactly none of that. While many works from Japan on a similar subject follow this simplest and most mass-compatible of all paths (Rose Hip Rose, Zeroin, ...) Yu Aida has chosen a different direction for his poetic series: the story is a drama. In the second instance it is a political, cynical view of our broken society. Then it's a tragic romance. And only then is it action. In the total of 15 volumes, of which not a single page is too much or too little, we experience and explore, above all, the mental life of little girls who had to suffer tragic fates for various reasons and could only be saved by getting turned into cyborgs - While one child had to watch its parents being slaughtered in front of its eyes during a robbery, only to be raped next to their corpses, another was the victim of a band of kidnappers who mutilated them beyond recognition for snuff porn films. It doesn’t get better. All memories of the girls' earlier lives are permanently blocked by so-called 'conditioning', but all too often in this story we experience how these traumatic incisions come back, subconsciously weigh on the children's psyches and define them.






Each of the cyborg girls also has a mentor called 'Fratello'(siblings)who are elite agents, and to which they get trained on with loyalty and affection through conditioning. But where does conditioning end and where does real affection begin? What if a little eight-year-old girl who was only supposed to be a murder weapon suddenly falls in love with her Fratello? Is that still the conditioning, or are these already 'her' feelings? In the first volume, just as in the remaining fourteen, Yu Aida is dedicated to this emotional-psychological misery and illuminates both how such a relationship ends in the most tragic way (volume 1) and in later chapters how it is possible to deal with that without disrespecting the feelings of the child entrusted to the Fratellos.


We mainly follow the characters Henrietta, Rico, Triela, Claes and Angelica, who form the main cast of the series and who all have their own, complex and without exception difficult relationship with their Fratellos - while the protagonist Henrietta is very devoted and open to him from the start, barely hiding her admiration for her Fratello José, the much older Triela, who acts as kind of a as 'big sister’ for the girls, behaves extremely distant from her mentor, but is still happy every time he gifts her a new teddy bear(!) for her collection that she can give a name to. Rico, in turn, whose Fratello Jean holds a leading position among the Fratellos and who fights the right-wing extremist terrorists more determined than anyone else, is what comes closest to the ideal of the organization - a ruthless, innocent killer who questions nothing, obeys her supervisor uncompromising and does not care about his lack of emotion towards her.


So we have all sorts of girls, all of whom have their own, excellently worked out personalities, fights and relationships, who have different attitudes towards fighting and, despite their cyborg existence, are still unmistakably young girls: Triela collects teddy bears, Henrietta wants gifts from José, The chronically ill Angelica always wants the story of the Pasta King read to her when she falls asleep, Claes is absorbed in tending to a small garden, Rico discovers what it means to like a boy - only to give him a sad smile shortly afterwards when she is ordered to shoot him. While other manga, anime or even western films are content to stylize child killers as unemotional and hardened professional murder tanks, Gunslinger Girl keeps working out that we are dealing with innocent girls who do not know what they are doing or why they are doing it - as long as their fratellos praises them, everything is fine.


And yet there are emotions that they harbor towards the organization, as a quote by Rico from Volume 1 shows:

Every morning, when I wake up, the first thought I have is: “I wonder if I still have my body.” What a relief! It still works. I can't describe in words how wonderful it is to have a body that works. I love my life at the Social Welfare Agency very much.


This short quote gives us a perspective on what it is like to have died and yet live: The cyborg girls, who under normal circumstances would have succumbed to all injuries from accidents, abuse or illness, are grateful to be alive and to be able to move. It doesn't matter for them to question the morals behind their task - not that they don't deal with politics and the meaning of the whole, as Triela and the later character Petra show in conversations with their Fratellos or Italian politicians.


In summary, the core of the story are the emotional and psychological wounds that the girls, used as weapons, carry around with them and suffer continually, which they try to overcome in different ways and which leave you with goosebumps and tears more than once while reading the volumes. There are numerous scenes in the manga, emotional highs or lows, where the reader just sits there and stares for minutes. Tries to process and understand what just happened. Just for the research for this review I flipped through all 15 volumes again, often I would get stuck and had tears in my eyes and stones in my stomach during a certain, depressing scene in Volume 9. The goosebumps accompany you through each volume. Because Gunslinger Girl is, in many ways, just so realistic - you can understand the shown emotions, interpersonal relationships, inner depths and social ties. You can feel them. When the otherwise so reserved Triela, after she has previously lost several times to the same opponent and is constantly tormenting herself with accusations, suddenly - wounded and half dead - comes to her Fratello with a broad smile and proudly tells him that she finally beat that opponent, that she won and killed him and if he would not like to praise her a little for it, we understand why her Fratello is speechless and grim. The sick Angelica is one of the very first cyborgs for whom medication and conditioning were still very ineffective - that's why she loses her memory every few days. Not only her Fratello, who teaches her the story of the Pasta King again and again and invests his affection in her, suffers from that.

None of these girls are happy. And all that most of their Fratellos try to achieve is to make them forget this fact for as long as possible.

In later volumes arrives, as already indicated, another protagonist which is almost an adult, Petra. Because of her age and her origin from the Russian Ballet, she has an entirely different dynamic with her Fratello, and thereby contributes the romance between Fratello and Cyborg in this story. Petra is aware of her feelings and she can live them out - because she is much more mature than the other cyborg girls and can assign and confidently name her feelings regardless of the conditioning. She is my personal favorite character, not only because she is the only cyborg who speaks on the same level with her Fratello and does not blindly obey him.



 

I've talked a lot about the main characters, but actually there are hardly any supporting characters: Even the cyborg girls, who are not in focus or only appear very late, are comprehensively worked out so that we get a good feeling for their personalities and they never seem shallow. The antagonists are an important part of the plot: Far from all, but some of the right-wing extremist Republican terrorists are understandable, empathic characters. Above all, the recurring trio Franca, Franco and Pinocchio are characters who murder, build bombs, carry out attacks and are still presented to the reader as people who think, feel and act according to their sincere convictions - a risky and incredibly difficult balancing act, because do we really want to empathize with terrorists when they ultimately die? Do we want to feel bad and be sad then? I say yes - because many terrorists and criminals are not monsters, but people who have reasons for what they do and who only cook with water too. Not that this justifies their actions. But Yu Aida paints a lot of gray tones into the painting of his story, so that every now and then you actually keep your fingers crossed for the other side.

Crafts - Drawings, action, politics

"Violence is the way of the world. I am simply playing along."

Okay, let's take a deep breath and get away from all the heavy stuff - the drawings. You can already see it on the covers and the panels shown, optically, Gunslinger Girl is rock solid, even if towards the beginning it is still quite rudimentary and unadorned. The pleasant effect is that you can really see an increase in Yu Aida's drawing skills with every volume, so that the series operates at a very, very high level at the latest with volume 10. The style is not overly memorable or special, but perfectly suited for this unadorned setting that is anchored in reality. The character artworks with their increasingly complex emotions are a pleasure. And the action.


I've talked a lot about the in-depth side of the series above, but don't worry, the action portion is there - My goodness is it there. It's brilliant and gets better with every volume. In every scene of Gunslinger Girl it is diabolical fun again how confused terrorists react to seemingly lost girls, only to be impressively knocked down by them moments later, or straightforward getting turned into dust. The fights are bloody and relentless but never even remotely splattery or even glorifying.


Towards the end of the series there is a kind of final, climatic battle of epic proportions, which in terms of tension, drama and atmosphere is one of the best that I have experienced in the manga genre, the last volumes are drawn on a fantastic and meticulous level which really lets you clenching your fists till your blood stops in the final battle. Here the girls and their fratellos fight, whom we have accompanied for more than 10 volumes. We know it will end - and we hope that each and every one of them survives. No, there really is no lack of tension and lead-heavy battles in Gunslinger Girl.
What is also not lacking is Italian politics. Gunslinger Girl is a trinity with the following key areas: Emotionality, politics / society and action. The second relates to the fight against terrorism and domestic politics in Italy, which we get explained and carried out over and over again within the 15 volumes through long and, for Manga, quite complex dialogues between various politicians and influential figures. The fact that this is about Italy and maybe not about america doesn't matter, because the political entanglements, intrigues and problems are internationally understandable and extremely interesting - nobody has to be afraid of tough political talks, the whole thing is good intertwined with the plot about our Integrated cyborgs.




Still - NOT having this story set in Japan but in Italy was probably Yu Aida's best idea in relation to this manga. I can't imagine the series would have worked in Japan as well. The European setting alone has avoided 90% of Japanese clichés that simply have no place in Gunslinger Girl, and for us Europeans there is also the advantage that all of this seems so familiar to us and we therefore can connect much more with Gunslinger Girl than with a manga based in Japan. The amount of research that Yu Aida must have done, especially on the political complexity and social division between northern and southern Italy, gives me headaches. Here someone carefully worked out what he wanted to tell, instead of just going ahead and writing about how a cool boy ends up in an online world and a dozen underage girls laugh at each other. Look, manga can do that too.

The End - The Power of Hope

'Death is our fate. But we don't have to just accept it. There's no reason for memories to just disappear into nothing without coming back. "

 

I mentioned the final battle. It is the dramatic and a consequent climax that effectively brings together all the subplots, character arcs and the common thread that runs through the fifteen volumes, without leaving any questions unanswered. All Fratello couples find their own consistent end point here - not all of them are beautiful, but each of them is staged by Yu Aida respectfully and comprehensively.

At the end of Gunslinger Girl there are a lot of depressing scenes - We have to say goodbye to many, cherished characters, have to shed one or two tears and grapple with the unpleasant fact that Gunslinger Girl is only a fictional story to a limited extent - states torn by ideological conflicts and internal political power struggles with most of the victims in the lowest rings of society are more relevant today than ever before, we know the violence and at the end of the day one has to wonder whether there is still hope in this insane, violent, dreary world?


Yu Aida has a clear answer to that.

First, to my mother who carried and raised me. And second, to my mother in heaven and the man most special to her. So I present this award to them, with these words ...


I am certain that there will always be hope in the world.

- Yoraiko