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Y: The Last Man Spoiler-Free Review
So yesterday I finished reading the Korean translation of the five-book deluxe edition of Y: The Last Man, the comic book series about every man and every male mammal dropping dead at the same time from a mysterious cataclysm. This leaves humanity in very real danger of dying out within decades. The protagonist Yorick is the last surviving man on Earth who becomes a piece in a vast game of women and nations working to secure gain or to give humanity a chance at survival.
It's an intriguing premise, post-apocalypse with a twist. It explores a lot of feminist issues in a world populated solely by women, and avoids the most obvious cliches like Yorick becoming a harem-master or a stallion. In fact his driving motivation is to find his girlfriend Beth, who was stranded in Australia at the time the worldwide gendercide happened. It's an exciting, very human start which, alas, did not sustain the drama. More on that below.
Artistically the book is gorgeous, and I don't regret buying all five books. (Wishsong bought the first couple of books so the collection will be whole when we marry, which seems appropriate in a weird way.) The gritty nature of a world that has lost half its population is very much evident, and artist Pia Guerra brings life to the characters and the frequent action scenesbecause women beating each other up is hot plus the many evocative dream sequences.
The lines are funny and clever with lots of wordplay and one-liners. There are numerous pop culture references that I think people my generation and up will enjoy. The Korean translation was good about annotating the references, though I got most of them. The plot is big and twisty, and with the survival of humanity at stake every scene is charged with tension.
That said, at the end I couldn't help feeling Y: The Last Man was more smart than it was moving. Every character who is not a thug seems to have the same "voice" in diction and rhythm, and the same urban, self-aware sense of humor brimming with the aforementioned pop culture references. It's a bit like watching an Aaron Sorkin show that way, the feeling that you're listening to the writer talking through different mouths.
More problematically, character motivations and emotions felt increasingly forced near the end. Not that they were implausible, just that they seemed to flow more from the needs of the plot than the characters, resulting in characters doing complete 180s just for the sake of having plot twists. A case in point: a lot of the ending focused on the pairings, and while I actually liked the idea of most of them they never quite meshed for me. It seemed like the characters felt the way they did because the author said so, rather than due to the people they were.
To go off on a brief tangent, since when did surprising the audience become the gold standard of writing? Yes, suspense is great and I like a clever plot reversal as much as the next girl. But the thing about plot twists, the thing that makes them so hard, is that they can't just be surprising. Surprise is easy; you only need to reverse prior developments and you can achieve it. The hard part is making it inevitable, so that when the reader or viewer looks back everything that happened so far points to this conclusion. Writing a plot twist without adequate buildup, or worse yet, by reversing prior buildup, is hollow and not worth the cheap shock. If you want to startle people without deeper emotional engagement, be a jack-in-the-box and not a writer.
Did I mention that I am insanely picky about my entertainment and almost impossible to please?
So while I found Y smart, engaging, and fun, kind of like that attractive and awesome guy or girl you kind of wish you could fall for, ultimately the emotional connection wasn't there. Like all good science fiction Y asks an intriguing question and answers it in a pretty satisfying way. But the real hook and bait of drama, the characters, were curiously missing in action and so the writing failed to reel me in. It's a beautiful and interesting work, it just didn't have a lot of chemistry--at least not with me.
These ladies will ALWAYS be awesome, though. (You can see more Agent 355 goodness at the image source.)
It's an intriguing premise, post-apocalypse with a twist. It explores a lot of feminist issues in a world populated solely by women, and avoids the most obvious cliches like Yorick becoming a harem-master or a stallion. In fact his driving motivation is to find his girlfriend Beth, who was stranded in Australia at the time the worldwide gendercide happened. It's an exciting, very human start which, alas, did not sustain the drama. More on that below.
Artistically the book is gorgeous, and I don't regret buying all five books. (Wishsong bought the first couple of books so the collection will be whole when we marry, which seems appropriate in a weird way.) The gritty nature of a world that has lost half its population is very much evident, and artist Pia Guerra brings life to the characters and the frequent action scenes
The lines are funny and clever with lots of wordplay and one-liners. There are numerous pop culture references that I think people my generation and up will enjoy. The Korean translation was good about annotating the references, though I got most of them. The plot is big and twisty, and with the survival of humanity at stake every scene is charged with tension.
That said, at the end I couldn't help feeling Y: The Last Man was more smart than it was moving. Every character who is not a thug seems to have the same "voice" in diction and rhythm, and the same urban, self-aware sense of humor brimming with the aforementioned pop culture references. It's a bit like watching an Aaron Sorkin show that way, the feeling that you're listening to the writer talking through different mouths.
More problematically, character motivations and emotions felt increasingly forced near the end. Not that they were implausible, just that they seemed to flow more from the needs of the plot than the characters, resulting in characters doing complete 180s just for the sake of having plot twists. A case in point: a lot of the ending focused on the pairings, and while I actually liked the idea of most of them they never quite meshed for me. It seemed like the characters felt the way they did because the author said so, rather than due to the people they were.
To go off on a brief tangent, since when did surprising the audience become the gold standard of writing? Yes, suspense is great and I like a clever plot reversal as much as the next girl. But the thing about plot twists, the thing that makes them so hard, is that they can't just be surprising. Surprise is easy; you only need to reverse prior developments and you can achieve it. The hard part is making it inevitable, so that when the reader or viewer looks back everything that happened so far points to this conclusion. Writing a plot twist without adequate buildup, or worse yet, by reversing prior buildup, is hollow and not worth the cheap shock. If you want to startle people without deeper emotional engagement, be a jack-in-the-box and not a writer.
Did I mention that I am insanely picky about my entertainment and almost impossible to please?
So while I found Y smart, engaging, and fun, kind of like that attractive and awesome guy or girl you kind of wish you could fall for, ultimately the emotional connection wasn't there. Like all good science fiction Y asks an intriguing question and answers it in a pretty satisfying way. But the real hook and bait of drama, the characters, were curiously missing in action and so the writing failed to reel me in. It's a beautiful and interesting work, it just didn't have a lot of chemistry--at least not with me.
These ladies will ALWAYS be awesome, though. (You can see more Agent 355 goodness at the image source.)