#damnwordlimits

Those of you who have watched the anime will have at least an idea of where I’m going with this one, but Katekyo Hitman Reborn (Reborn for short) struggles with the problem of story escalation.

  Basically, without a sense of escalation a long running story will fall short. You know how Superhero comics, films and television often gets kind of bizarre? Iron Man goes from fighting terrorists to saving half the universe. Smallville Clark Kent starts off punching mooks with superpowers to fighting immortal Kryptonian monsters.

 Reborn begins as what is known as a gag manga: an episodic series where humour is more important than story or depth. But following the likes of Dragon Ball, Reborn eventually moves into the realm of action and plot.

  “But what is the premise” I didn’t hear you ask. Our hero Japanese 14-year old Sawada Tsunayoshi (or Tsuna) turns out to be related to the founder of a mafia group and naturally that means he needs to become the next leader. Reborn, the titular Katekyo Hitman (hitman home tutor… it’s manga, deal with it) is sent to groom him into the perfect mafia boss, and is completely unperturbed by the fact that Tsuna is both an idiot and a wimp.

 So once the story actually begins, Tsuna is sent to capture some mafia criminals (criminals even by the mafia’s standards) and while the villain, Rokudo Mukuro, has some grand plans, him actually succeeding at them is a whole other thing.

  Then for the next story, he has to fight a branch of his mafia who have equal claim to the position, but they are jerks and so he resists (also, he and his friends would be murdered if he didn’t win).

  Both of these are pretty low stakes, only really affecting the criminal world, but definitely escalating. So presumably the third story arc is something like an intra-mafia battle, right?

 Tsuna has to save all of reality.

 What, the fuck?

I’m not kidding in the slightest. The antagonist, Byakuran, has the power to cross parallel realities and has ruined all infinite of them (shut up! just think Crisis of Infinite Earths from DC) in an attempt at designing his own world. Tsuna and his friends have been dragged 10 years into the only remaining timeline in order to stop Byakuran. Should he fail, all reality is gone.

 So what’s the next storyline? Tsuna has a squabble with some more mafia.

 What, the fuck?

 The next story isn’t much better but there’s no point in going into it. The damage has been done.

  The escalation of Reborn shoots way beyond reason, before plummeting down to something more acceptable.

 But even weirder, it manages to work. The arc with Byakuran destroying the cosmos doesn’t have a whole lot of emotional depth, but unbelievably high stakes, whereas later stories have intense emotion. The mafia in the next story has a long but forgotten history and the members of which almost perfectly match-up or reflect Tsuna’s own friend group.