Spoiler Question for Hikaru no Go Anime versus Manga

Spoiler space for a question about Hikaru no Go, anime versus manga.

S P O I L E R

S P A C E

Okay, here we are with 'Hikaru no Go' hitting episode 60 and Sai goes off with a sniffle because he feels that Hikaru doesn't need him any more. When Hikaru wakes up ( figuratively as well as actually ) Sai is gone, and Hikaru is really panicked and eventually decides to quit Go. We than have a three episodes of Hikaru going off all over the place, looking for Sai unsuccessfully, while the audience learns various trivia about famous dead Go players.

Then suddenly, in episode 64 there is a semi-comic 'flashback' episode to when Hikaru first met Sai. Hikaru gets a chance to best a crooked antiques dealer and win back a valuable dish for a little girl. Huh? WTF is going on? This is as if a whole different team suddenly took over at Studio Pierrot.

The following week we are back in 'real time', and Hikaru is still in denial, and Isumi goes off to China to study Go some more. There he is initially humiliated badly and loses even more confidence.

At the end of that episode, the previews for the following week are another 'flash back', this time to a much younger Akira teaching some smart-ass older kid a lesson.

Okay - what's going on here? Does this happen in the manga at all? Are these fill-ins to allow the manga to get ahead of the anime again?

Dave Baranyi

The parts with Sai leaving, Hikaru hunting around for him, and Izumi going to China are in the manga. I actually only have through volume 14, and that's where Sai has just defeated Touyou Meijin and Hikaru has pointed out how the Meijin could have won. So I don't know if the other stories are in there. It's around volume 16 or 17 when Izumi goes to China

They're mixing up the order in weird ways. I don't remember the historical figure highlights in the manga near this point, but the sidestories/flashbacks fill Vol 18. The actual 'realtime' storyline sounds like it's around the beginning of Vol 16, so things are weird.

Basically, after a certain point, in fact after a *really* good stopping point for the whole series, the mangaka for HikaGo decided to take a break from the main plot with a bunch of sidestories. Studio Pierrot is evidently just fitting them in in strange places.

I'd guess they felt that a half-dozen chronologically disconnected side-stories spanning many different characters doesn't work as well on TV. You can always skip the one volume of manga if that isn't your thing, but television likes to have a reliable audience.

BTW, I've only read some scanslations, so I have *no* idea if the historical figures thing happens later. They haven't gotten to that story in the manga at the site I visit, so I don't know where that came from, unless you were classifying the Hiroshima trip under that category. So for all I know, they could be mixing in even later side-stories! Funky, huh?

But in any case, they haven't caught up yet. I think the manga got to the point where the anime is over a year ago, if I remember the R.A.M. posts correctly. Since they seem to fit ~2 manga chapters into each anime episode, and the manga is a weekly, I guess that means they have about a year or a little more before they start needing series-specific filler...

Oh, and yes, Isumi's story is in the manga, too. So if you consider the current stuff to be filler, at least it's canonical filler. ;P

Jonathan Fisher who really needs to buy a goban sometime...

Ah nuts - that was what I was afraid of. I suspect what has happened is that the 'Hikaru Effect' has taken on a life of its own in RL, what with all the hype over kids re-discovering Go, and all the various Go-related paraphernalia that are now being pushed. For example, there are three levels of Go boards being advertised to kids, along with all the video games.

Dave Baranyi

Thanks for the info. It's a bit of a shame to let a great series like this peter out in such an odd way. Such are the powers of market forces I guess.

Dave Baranyi

It's pretty standard for Shonen Jump, Magazine, and Sunday (and perhaps other series). Most series go on long after they should have stopped, and often long after the mangaka is interested in making the series. Look at Dragon Ball as another example.

Then there are mangaka who are just good at doing really long series

And KochiKame passed 100 quite a few years ago. It's almost completely episodic too.