No.6 Discussion Board

West Block => Latch Building => Topic started by: jjbinkes on May 20, 2015, 06:48:47 pm


Title: Comparison between No.6 and The Song of Achilles
Post by: jjbinkes on May 20, 2015, 06:48:47 pm
Hi everyone!

I am new to the No.6 community (recently finished watching the anime, reading the manga now).

While watching the anime, I was also reading The Song of Achilles and the parallels are insane.

Pretending to be a girl (Achilles and Nezumi)
Girl(s) wanting to have sex, unrequited love (Shion and Safu, Achilles and Deidameia, Patroclus and Briseis)
Wanting to keep Shion Shion and Achilles Achilles (Nezumi and Patroclus, respectively)
Shion and Patroclus healing and bandaging others
Achilles and Nezumi being wonderful singers

There’s probably a lot more, including how they die (Greek gods don’t usually allow the whole coming back from the dead).
Hell, Inukashi even calls Shion Nezumi’s Achilles heel (lol)

I almost think No.6 was partially based off of Achilles and Patroclus from the Illiad (which I haven't read, technically, since The Song of Achilles is just a rendition of it).

What do you guys think?

Edit: Sion --> Shion
Title: Re: Comparison between No.6 and The Song of Achilles
Post by: listenforthelove on May 21, 2015, 05:53:09 pm
Hi there @jjbinkes! Great to see your here at the forum, I hope you'll enjoy your stay here =)

I must confess I haven't read 'The Song of Achilles' and it's been a while since I read (parts of) the Iliad, but you make interesting points. It fits quite well, doesn't it? If memory serves, Achilles was a lot kinder towards Patroclus than he was towards others, which sounds suspiciously familiar... Achilles' heel indeed.
Looking at the Iliad, Achilles' wrath over being dishonored by Agamemnon is a central theme, which kind of ties in with Nezumi's will to take revenge on the city. (In which case that would make Agamemnon No. 6?) I think the gods meddle in at Achilles' request as well, hm... 
I'm actually not sure, but my memory seems to insist Patroclus, until he went on his rampage, wasn't really considered a fighter at all, or at least a good fighter (or well, not as good as Achilles, but then again, that's Achilles). Which you could relate to no-one thinking Shion would harm anyone - until you hurt Nezumi, that is.

Well, it doesn't match up 100% of course, but those are certainly interesting parallels~ I wonder if reading the manga will lead to you coming up with more, since it's slightly different than the anime in places (I think I can state that much without spoiling ^^).
Title: Re: Comparison between No.6 and The Song of Achilles
Post by: jjbinkes on May 21, 2015, 07:48:39 pm
Thank you for the welcome!

Also, great point about Patroclus and Shion being surprisingly good fighters when necessary! Gotta protect dat bae, right?

I'm currently waiting for volume's 6-9 of the manga to ship to my house from Amazon since no website seems to host them post-licensing (also want to support the author).
I'll definitely update with anything else I find once they get here!

So far, the manga > anime, but I still love the anime. Has anyone read the novel version? Is it significantly different enough to warrant a separate read?

I also strongly recommend everyone take a gander at The Song of Achilles, because if you love No.6 (which, being on this forum, I hope you do) then you will absolutely adore it.
Madeline Miller took TEN YEARS writing that book as accurately to legend as possible and it shows. Sadly, I noticed she doesn't seem to be working on anything else. I'm a fairly hard core fan of Rick Riordan and that man puts out books at an amazing pace!

(Side note: for some reason, hard core as one word appears as ****? Anyone know why?)
Title: Re: Comparison between No.6 and The Song of Achilles
Post by: listenforthelove on May 22, 2015, 04:02:12 am
Ah, it's great that you're supporting the manga release! I hope you'll get your copies soon~ The scanlators indeed stopped once the series got licensed after Kodansha asked them to, but they did provide summaries for the later chapters. (If you're really impatient, you can check out the links page (http://restructuralcommittee.tumblr.com/links) of the restructuralcommittee blog for summaries and raws.)

I'd definitely recommend reading the novels as well! 9th avenue has the translations up right here (http://9th-ave.blogspot.nl/p/no-6.html); the manga keeps to the novels fairly well, but of course it can't convey everything the novels have to offer. There's a lot of character introspection and some great scenes that the manga had to skip. Of course, in some cases an image says more than a thousand words, but you can only cram so many thought balloons into a single page.

I looked up The Song of Achilles and it sounded really interesting!  I hadn't heard of it before, but I'm definitely going to put it on my to-read list, I'm very curious now. (Actually, I think I saw Rick Riordan had commented on it on goodreads? So I'm not sure if you mentioned him on purpose, but that was  a funny coincidence then. And yeah, he writes super quickly O_O Binge-read the Percy Jackson/Heroes of Olympus series a while ago and I was amazed that most of them were only a year apart at most. What the heck.)


(Ah yeah, we know about the censoring issue, sorry about that ^^; it's built in. I think it's been tried to change it but I'm not sure if that's possible. At least it doesn't censor hard and core separately then...)
Title: Re: Comparison between No.6 and The Song of Achilles
Post by: lawlya on May 22, 2015, 05:30:38 pm
Those really are a lot of parallels o.O I just say Wow! to that and it's amazing when someone notices things like that (as I am someone who enjoys without thinking about content too much, ahahaha. Easy to please and so on.)
You probably just added another piece to my long, long list of books I want to read. Thanks for that :D
Title: Re: Comparison between No.6 and The Song of Achilles
Post by: Ahiku on May 23, 2015, 12:58:33 pm
This is really interesting o.o I wonder if it's just a coincidence or if Asano referred to this story.

Ah, and welcome here, jjbinkes :3