Otr of the Flame Was Not Big in Japan…or Anywhere Else

The popularity of manga has grown exponentially outside of Japan in the last two decades. Manga chapters are now translated into half a dozen different languages and distributed around the world within days of their release in Japan. Younger readers may not remember a time when, if foreigners read manga at all, they had to go out of their way to find it and understand it. The relationship between mangaka and gaijin-reader was one of asymmetric consumption. Foreigners were a niche secondary market, an after thought. Foreign feedback to the Japanese creators was so rare as to be non-existent. Even if one could figure out how to contact a creator or a publisher in the pre-social-media age, the language barrier loomed large. The times, though, they are a-changing. Creators are easy to find on social media. Automated translation is often good enough to get a simple point across. Japan has been able to increase domestic manga sales, mostly thanks to digital distribution, but I predict that domestic growth will level out as the Japanese birth rate continues to decline.  The foreign market, on the other hand, shows no sign of slowing its exponential growth. For the time being, the domestic manga market is still orders of magnitude larger than all foreign markets combined, but the gap is slowly closing. This has lead many on on both sides of the creator-audience relationship to begin questioning if the manga industry should be more mindful of its global audience. 

Most readers will know that manga tend to be published in anthology magazines (a format that we had in America long before Japan and have since mostly lost, but that’s a story for another blog). Space and marketing in these anthologies is highly competitive, and publishers have long engaged readers in polls to vote for their favorites. Low favorability and/or low individual volume sales will lead to a series being dropped. The industry has been slow to adapt to expanding global interest, though. Publishing decisions are almost exclusively based on domestic data. 

    For the most part, Japanese and non-Japanese audiences agree on what’s good. Occasionally, though, for a variety of reasons, a Japanese title may lack domestic appeal, but find and audience abroad. Many foreign readers have expressed frustration with the cancellation of series that are beloved in their communities. From a business standpoint, it feels like Japan may be leaving money on the table. 

But is it a slippery slope? If Japanese publishers begin soliciting the feedback of foreigners, might they also become motivated to produce series specifically for that lucrative new market? A number of Japanese creators have come out recently in favor of a “Japan First” approach to storytelling. In an interview with Forbes Japan, Hideaki Anno (Evangelion, Shin Godzilla) and Takashi Yamazaki (Godzilla Minus One) argued that, while they are not ungrateful for their global audience, they think that creating for the domestic market gives their work a unique “Japanese” flavor. The CEO of publishing conglomerate Kadokawa has also emphasized the importance of works that retain an inherent Japaneseness. 

    Despite my own outsider status in this conversation, I’m sympathetic to artists who are reluctant to embrace global market influences shaping their art. Part of what drew me to manga in the first place was the uniqueness of the genre. There are stories you find in manga that you won’t find in other mediums (though I have mixed feelings on this argument, see renowned manga artist and *checks notes* politician, Ken Akamatsu, rebuking efforts to ban loli-hentai as Western “political correctness”). 

This brings me to the recently cancelled manga, Otr of the Flame (灯火のオテル), a shonen battler “inspired” by Norse myth and legend. 

I have a very particular set of skills…

Skills that make me a nightmare for Japanese artists attempting to create fun, quirky, shonen battlers based on Norse mythology. There are three languages that I have seriously studied in my life: French, Japanese, and Old Norse. Hversu ferr nú mín drengir? It’s an unusual combination, but I’m always excited when something checks more than two boxes on my random interests list. There’s been a bit of a viking craze in media lately. Try as they might, Japan has not been immune to that particular global influence with titles ranging from Vinland Saga (very good) to Farewell, My Odin (pretty good) to Otr. 

Vinland Saga is a well-researched, well-written, well-drawn manga loosely based on the actual Vinland Sagas: Grænlendinga Saga and Eiríks Saga Rauða. It’s clearly the project of someone who was deeply interested in that period of history in that part of the world. Farewell, My Odin seems to be mostly based on Vinland Saga, but it’s still enjoyable for what it is and it captures the flavor of the sagas. It’s probably still more historically accurate than Miller’s 300 at any rate. Then there’s Otr, a kid-friendly story that is more interested in the supernatural elements of Norse myth than any kind of historical context. I understand that the artist of Otr of the Flame, Yuki Kawaguchi, also has a series called Red Hood that mines some material from German fairy tales. Unfortunately, I have not read it and will not be able to comment on it.

As I was browsing the comments on the English chapters of Otr, I noticed several people talking about Kawaguchi’s work being more popular outside of Japan. Several people seemed to think that Otr was not as good as the also-cancelled Red Hood, and that if non-Japanese feedback and financials were taken into account, one or both series might have survived at least a little longer. I thought that was an interesting lens through which to view the series; especially when considering its Germanic (not to be confused with German) inspiration. Would Otr, with it’s Northern aesthetic, have found an audience in the Tolkien-loving “west” if it had been given more time? Was its aesthetic unappealing to a Japanese audience that typically goes in more for katanas, martial arts, and exorcisms?

    First, let’s examine Otr’s relationships to the mythology it borrows from. Most of the characters’ names are mined from the Eddas (The Poetic Edda and Snorri Sturlusson’s Prose Edda are our primary sources for Norse myth). Sometimes the choice of a name makes sense to me, but often it doesn’t. For example, Otr is literally the Norse word for Otter, like the animal. It appears in a myth about a dwarf named Otr who takes the form of an otter (Dwarves can shapeshift. It’s a whole thing). In the manga, Otr is not a dwarf, nor is he an otter, nor does he have anything to do with the character from the Edda. Another character goes by the name Huginn, which can be translated as “thought” or “mind” and is the name of one of Odin’s ravens who flies over the world each day to gather news. They return to Odin each evening and tell him what they saw. The character is not a raven and does not fly around the world gathering news. 

Otr partners with a flame spirit named Fylgja. Fylgja isn’t a name, but rather a kind of being. They don’t show up much in the eddas. In the sagas, they appear as spirits attached to a person or family. They may be helpful. They usually visit in a dream to give some message. Fylgja the fire spirit is unlike anything in the sources. In Otr, important characters bond with elemental spirits to use their power, usually to performing magical weapon attacks. There is nothing quite like this in the Old Norse sources, though it’s possible that Kawaguchi is drawing from modern Neopagan religious beliefs.

The magic system (or battle system) in Otr seems very “manga” to me. It doesn’t mesh well with what we know about the actual attitudes and practices of the culture that Otr is drawing inspiration from. There isn’t really anything analogous to qi in Germanic myth and legend. Otr’s concept of “Heroic Vigor” is an invention that is alien to the source material. It feels tacked on and out of place in a story from the Viking age, but something like it is present in almost every shonen battle manga.

Fylgja’s fire magic and her ability to merge with Otr to grant him powerful battle transformations is a little more in line with the mythology, but it feels distinctly modern. There are stories of heroes who could transform into a bear. There are stories of heroes who could enter into the berserksgangr (berserker rage) and become immune to fire and steel. Modern Norse pagan movements do sometimes incorporate practices and and beliefs from other systems of ritual magic. This spirit-bonding sounds a bit more like post-Christian western esoteric belief to me. 

Together Otr and Fylgja travel the world and encounter other spirits and fighters. They meet dwarves and elves. Interestingly, the modern conception of dwarves and elves in fantasy is based almost entirely on J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth mythology. Tolkien drew heavily on the Norse sources when creating his mythology, but he took some creative liberties. Tolkien’s elves and dwarves are much more well defined and established than those in the old norse sources. In the Eddas, the words “elf” and “dwarf” are used interchangeably at times. Both seem to be non-human beings that tend to have positive relations with the Aesir (Odin, Thor, etc), but it’s not very clear what they look like or what their culture is. The one thing that is always mentioned, though, is that the dwarves are excellent craftsman. They make many of the weapons and treasures of the Gods. 

    I find it a bit refreshing that Kawaguchi goes in his own direction with elves and dwarves. Kawaguchi’s dwarves are still expert craftsman, but they are a little less stereotypically Tolkien-esque than I was expecting. As for the elves, well…

    I actually very much enjoyed this twist. It’s played mostly as a joke, but there are elements to it that I like. It does actually hit pretty close to the mark that elves are a different sort of being. Tolkien imagined them as otherworldly, immortal prodigies, but it is certainly open for interpretation. In fairness to the lore, though, virtually every named elf I can think of is explicitly male. Also, the broader intellectual point Otr is making is somewhat undermined by the somewhat-fetishy way the elves are drawn.

Unfortunately, Kawaguchi probably got the news that Otr was cancelled shortly after introducing the elves and their kingdom on Yggdrasil (which had more in common with Teldrassil from World of Warcraft than the legendary ash tree). Things ramp up very quickly from that point in the manga. Until then, Otr and his companions had been traveling to collect spirits and gather forces to fight the fabled Ice King. 

Very quickly, the Ice King showed up and revealed that he was not actually the big bad, but the jailer of the big bad. The true big bad is the generic demon king who is about to escape. Oh and he just escaped. Otr and the Ice King must join forces to defeat not-Sauron. Final battle time.

I know we’ve already moved past names, but I thoroughly enjoyed that the Ice King was named Fimbul. I assume this is a reference to The Fimbulvetr (Fimbul Winter, Great Winter) a 3 year long winter that is said to be the prelude to Ragnarǫk. Fimbul is one of those words that doesn’t get translated sometimes because it sounds cool. It’s a fun word, but it’s a weird thing to name someone. It means “mighty” or “great” and it’s used in a lot of other ways than just Fimbulvetr.

Otr of the Flame does not sound like something right out of a saga. It sounds like something right out of every other shonen battle manga. Otr was not made with any great love for Norse myth and saga. I don’t get the impression that Kawaguchi has ever read the Eddas or the sagas. It reads to me like someone decided on a pop-culture viking aesthetic first, and then Googled for words they could use to make it feel more Norse. It is a generic story relying on an exotic setting as a gimmick. I’m not surprised it didn’t work.

Would the foreign market have saved Otr?

Can we talk about this way of holding knives? Have you noticed how many characters have this knife pose?

Probably not. Otr feels like it was written by the editor. I imagine the pitch going something like this. Kawaguchi has some dedicated fans from the European-flavored Red Hood. The magazine is over saturated with stories about exorcists and samurai and demons. Viking stuff is popular right now. Let’s drop the fairy tales in favor of the fantasy. Do something with vikings. 

Kawaguchi is a phenomenal artist. His character designs are always on point. He creates some of the most dynamic fight scenes I’ve seen in Shonen Jump. When it comes to the storytelling, though, there is a severe lack of originality. Every story element in Otr has been done better in other manga. Unlike Vinland Saga, which seems to come from a genuine passion for the material, Otr is just looking to mine ideas from a mythology that hasn’t already been thoroughly played out Japan. 

I don’t believe that the “Viking Stuff” is what caused Japanese audiences to reject Otr. On the contrary, I believe that if it had delved more deeply into the “Viking Stuff” and found a way to adapt it to a shonen battle system rather than just replacing “qi” with “heroic vigor” and “kami” with “spirits,” it would have been a unique addition to the magazine. Instead, shallow characters and a generic plot lead Japanese readers to overlook Otr. 

While Otr was not created specifically to cater to the foreign market, I do think that Otr demonstrates the kind of mediocre storytelling can happen when someone works with cultural artifacts that they don’t know or care much about. I don’t want this to be construed as an argument against writing stories that take place outside of one’s own lived cultural experience. After all, none of us have lived in 10th century Scandinavia, but there are plenty of interesting modern stories set in that time (Not the least of which is Vinland Saga). Rather, this is an argument against market-driven creative development.

In that interview with Forbes Japan, Takashi Yamazaki mentioned that there are probably many people in Hollywood who are better at making films aimed at a global market than there are in Japan. He then acknowledged that Hollywood films have been criticized as becoming overly formulaic, and that maybe Japanese media having a unique flavor is an advantage. It’s a diplomatic answer that dances around the real point. Hollywood is becoming boring because it’s losing its voice and it’s perspective as it tries to please everyone. 

I’m walking a fine line here, because this line of argument is often twisted to argue that anything meaningful must also be offensive to somebody. As a result, offending people is just a consequence of self-expression and the opinions of the offended can be dismissed. Artistic expression does not exist beyond discourse. It is discourse. I express myself. You express yourself. We change each other in the process.

It is difficult to define what “good art” is, but if pressed, I would say that good art is any creative process that expresses something important to the creator. It doesn’t have to be some lofty philosophical treatise. It can be simple or silly. Art matters because it matters to the artist and the audience. If you can sell a few comic books while you do it, that’s great. But selling comic books isn’t the place we should start from. 

The writing in Otr of the Flame feels like it was designed in a lab to appeal to a target demographic. The visual art is interesting and challenging. If Kawaguchi can step up his writing game, he has the potential to be one of the greats. If not, he should partner with a writer. Ultimately, a manga needs to have a story to succeed, and Otr did not.

A caution about getting too caught up in the cancellation prediction game

This doesn’t really fit nicely into the rest of the essay, so I’m dropping it here at the end. 

As I looked more into the comments around Otr, I’ve noticed something that I don’t love. Much of the conversation in manga spaces is now dominated by predictions about series’ prospects of cancellation or “success.” As global audiences become more involved in, and aware of, the marketing decisions of Japanese publishers, some of this is inevitable. I wouldn’t even say that this is a bad thing. What bothers me is when business analytics get blended with literary critique. 

I’ve seen numerous examples of people arguing about the quality of a series and then using profitability, popularity metrics, and longevity as the primary justification (or even proof) for their arguments. To be blunt, that’s bad critique. I have argued here that Otr is a comparatively mediocre manga. I have complimented its art. I have criticized its story. I’ve compared it with its source material and with other similar manga. I want to be very clear though that Otr’s cancellation does not confirm my opinion. 

The editors at Shonen Jump and other magazines are authorities in their field. Their insight and experience are valuable and interesting, but are not the arbiters of “good” art. As much as Hideaki Anno and Takashi Yamaguchi do not want their artistic integrity to be unduly influenced by global market forces, we should be cautious that our own artistic integrity is not unduly influenced by Japanese market forces. The market is a necessary evil. Art must move through the market to reach audiences and the market is, by nature, competitive. Art is not competitive by nature, though. We should not rush to make it a competition, and I’m cautious about celebrating the competitive elements forced onto art. 

While I think that Otr is mediocre, I am glad that Kawaguchi is creating and I would encourage him to continue creating. My main complaint is that I do not feel the story was his authentic expression. The world would be a better place if more people thought more deeply (and less competitively) about their experiences. I’m concerned that when we talk about art like it’s a sport or an investment, that we’re denying ourselves the opportunity for deeper reflection.