Forum - View topicCross Ange: Rondo of Angels and Dragons (TV).
|
Goto page Previous Next |
| Author | Message | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
DuskyPredator
 Posts: 15501 Location: Brisbane, Australia |
|
|||||
No, it is like finding out your sister is a witch, an evil person who cannot truly care for, and a soulless brute because she not only lacks the foundation of society, but is an affront to it. I get that you are saying evil, but you are holding it to our values. Evil is really a subject point of view, it is a construct and is built around society taboos. Homosexual people used to be committed to asylums. |
||||||
|
||||||
Vaisaga
 Posts: 13230 |
|
|||||
Not true. It's well established that mana is the cause of world peace. Unlike Rygart who was mocked for not being able to use mana, norma destroy mana. They're seen as the monsters who hide under the bed and threaten to throw all of society into chaos. Once you're outed as a norma, you're no longer human in the eyes of the world. We've seen three mothers fight to protect their daughters so far, so you can't say they gave up without a fight. Hilda's mom simply moved on with her life. Sylphia is a 12 year old girl who just lost her parents and found out the person she looked up to was a monster. There'll certainly be that sense of betrayal as she probably believes Ange was lying to her all along. Perhaps her accident was no accident. Of course Ange wasn't at fault for any of that, but you try to reason with an overly emotional child. I'll bet Julio helped put those ideas in her head too. To them they're just serving punishment to the one who destroyed their country. |
||||||
|
||||||
|
Bugnin
Posts: 575 |
|
|||||
This is silly because it would be like you turning on your sister, despite her never actually having done anything wrong. No, that's not really believable by any normal standard. It'd be one thing is was said sister casting spells and haunting people, but this is more akin to someone pointing at your sister and saying "she's a witch" and you replying" Oh why didn't someone tell me sooner? Where's my pitchfork!" Evil isn't really subject to a set of core values. You're thinking of morality. The concept of evil stems from a total and universal lack of basic human empathy. |
||||||
|
||||||
|
Bugnin
Posts: 575 |
|
|||||
...and so she became a monster herself for the sake of torturing the sister she supposedly adored as much if not more than her parents. Total 180. No regrets whatsoever. And while Julio may have given her the idea, her thoughts are her own. She's a kid, not a robot. Even if you blamed your sister for the death of your parents, there should be some hesitation to want to torture her like a sadistic animal. Sylphia has none. It's like Ange was some random assassin that shot her parents in cold blood. And that's my point of all of this. The total and willing break with all empathy. Each and every one of the people in that world would gladly turn each other over to imprisonment and death, so long as it isn't them. Do we ever see Nouma turning themselves over? Nope. So clearly this is not being done for the common good. This is a world of cruel, selfish people willingly buying into a policy where anyone at any time can be betrayed without hesitation, and everyone is on board with sacrificing anyone close to them, so long as it isn't them losing their freedom/life. |
||||||
|
||||||
HaruhiToy
 Posts: 4118 |
|
|||||
This has become a pretty interesting thread. For people living in our world I think Bugin is right. You cannot change your attitude about someone so completely and so quickly as the non-Norma characters seem to do. In order to do that you would have to have almost no memory, or have your memories altered drastically. That does seem to happen now and then in real history, but even many germans resisted Nazi depredations as much as they could. On the other hand perhaps DP and Visaga are right for this story's characters. Perhaps some level of mind control is what is actually happening with this Light of Mana technology. For Hilda's mother and Ange's sister it looks like the Ange that Ange knows literally doesn't exist except as some object that had deceived and harmed them from the past. But if so, how did Momoka escape that? Or did she? At the rate we are going I would not be surprised to to find out that Momoka had the task of bringing Ange back exactly for this purpose and is gladly waiting to tie the noose to hang her with. Everything seems to be pointing to that except for one thing. Momoka seemed pleased that Ange took Hilda aboard when she escaped. |
||||||
|
||||||
|
Bugnin
Posts: 575 |
|
|||||
|
There almost has to be some sort of personality-altering control, or this becomes very hard to accept, short of 99.9% of mana users just being irredeemable monsters.
|
||||||
|
||||||
|
DuskyPredator
Posts: 15501 Location: Brisbane, Australia |
|
|||||
|
@ Bugnin
How are you so incapable of looking at something from a different culture's point of view? How hard is it to get that they are not treated as people. No one has turned on family quickly over being a Norma. You are greatly underestimating how memories and feelings can fester over time and specific experiences. I feel like it is happening increasingly that people shout that character actions do not make sense due to their own culture. Do you like eating meat? Because you can bet some cultures would consider the mere idea as barbaric and evil. |
||||||
|
||||||
|
Bugnin
Posts: 575 |
|
|||||
|
Because there is no culture that I'm aware of that literally turns on family without hesitation.
Did you watch the last episode? At all? And stop passing this off as a "culture" thing. Norma themselves are not getting rid of themselves, are they? This isn't some sacrifice that everyone understands and is in agreement on, it's self-serving back stabbing. The only ones that think Norma are terrible, evil creatures are the people that aren't norma. And once a person is discovered to be Norma, they suddenly think the policy is horrible because it is happening to them. Everyone in that world looks out for themselves, no matter who else gets sacrificed. You keep comparing this to real world beliefs that don't apply. Beliefs do not apply if you only believe when it's convenient to you. Then it's just an excuse. |
||||||
|
||||||
Yttrbio
 Posts: 3653 |
|
|||||
|
Er... have you been watching the show, then? Because no one has "turned on their family" without hesitation. Every time it occurs, it happens over the course of a significant amount of time.
|
||||||
|
||||||
|
DuskyPredator
Posts: 15501 Location: Brisbane, Australia |
|
|||||
Yes I did, Ange was away for probably at the least a month, over time she went from thinking that they were the source of all evil to having her entire belief system brought down. The sister may have secretly been holding a grudge about being hurt, but she still loved her as the perfect example of a citizen. She had that entire time with all that in her face that her sister is a monster, full grown men are afraid of baby Norma, that is the very core setting of this series. The series has painfully already shown how the public view Norma. And Hilda's mother, there were years, she probably cried herself into a depression and was only able to bring herself out by pretending it never happened.
And the series extensively showed how much disliked Norma, how she ended up in denial because she did not feel like what she had heard they were like. Ange continued to hold onto her beliefs that Norma are brutes and had others tell her that she is one too. |
||||||
|
||||||
|
Bugnin
Posts: 575 |
|
|||||
Seriously? You're giving Hilda's mother a tragic side story conjured out of thin air to make her appear sympathetic? Juding by the age of the "new" hilda, I think she waited about a day before she went about the process of having a replacement child... BTW, given "new" hilda's reaction to the "defective" Hilda being a Norma, the mother is more than happy teaching her new daughter how horrible Norma are...
...until she accepted that she was a Norma, and then poof! no more belief system! Funny how no one in this series believes Norma are bad when they discover that they themselves are Norma....this is just like any other culture....nothing out of the ordinary at all. Everyone is totally on board with this, for the good of everyone. |
||||||
|
||||||
Blood-
 Bargain Hunter Posts: 23843 |
|
|||||
|
I agree that the show is laying on the pathos with a trowel. However, that is a trademark of melodrama and Cross Ange has proudly displayed its melodramatic bona fides since day one. I get people who don't dig the style but when I allow myself to embrace it, as I have here, I really go with it. I know there is going to be some cathartic payback down the pipe and I eagerly await it.
As for the question posed by Bugnin (I think) as to whom there is to cheer for... Ange and the gals in her squadron, including even Hilda, now. Yes, that's right, the show has even manipulated me into feeling for the recently despised Hilda. That just the kind of easy emotional sucker I am. I made this point when the show first started, but I'll repeat it here: it would seem the show is using the Norma/Mana User divide as an analogy for racism and it's an awful one. That's because racism is by its very nature irrational. To hate someone based on nothing more than the color of their skin is irrational. Unfortunately, the construct in Cross Ange for why Mana Users hate Normas is not irrational. If you posit a world where war, violence, poverty, etc have (apparently) been eradicated thanks solely to the use of Mana, then hatred and paranoia towards those who can dispel the effects of Mana is not irrational, even if some viewers deplore the hamfisted way that the show chooses to dramatize the reaction to Normas by Mana Users. |
||||||
|
||||||
|
Bugnin
Posts: 575 |
|
|||||
No, I get that the Normas are the only people in this series allowed to have a sense of actual human empathy, with one or two exceptions out of the presumably millions of mana users. My question was more along the lines of what is there to root for? They're risking their lives each day protecting an entire population that pretty much has no redeeming quality. They have no loved ones to protect as they've all willingly shunned them. What outcome am I supposed to want here as a viewer, other than the squad not get killed in each encounter? Certainly, I'm not rooting for them to stop the Dragons, which was supposed to be the premise of the show. |
||||||
|
||||||
|
Blood-
Bargain Hunter Posts: 23843 |
|
|||||
|
I don't know about you, but I am cheering for the horrible system of persecuting Normas to be overthrown.
And to see Julio being fed his own penis, of course. |
||||||
|
||||||
|
Bugnin
Posts: 575 |
|
|||||
|
Sure, but when the system is overthrown, the people who knowingly and willingly supported it for decades are still there. If you want a Nazi comparison, that would be it. The nazi party would be gone but the nazis themselves would remain.
Does anyone want to see Hilda re-united with the mother that replaced her and treated her like garbage? Ange with the twisted sister that tortured her just for kicks? Are they going to do another personality 180 and forget everything they did? Julio will probably have to die for the system to be changed, but is he any different than everyone else? He's just at the top of it. |
||||||
|
||||||
 |
All times are GMT - 5 Hours |
|
|
|
Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group