Forum - View topicREVIEW: She, The Ultimate Weapon DVD
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Akane the Catgirl
Posts: 1091 Location: LA, Baby! |
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@Stratum You're twisting my words. I never implied death can only have ONE purpose. Your examples can also work depending on how they're executed. Grave of the Fireflies is a good example of Number Four, as that is a result of Seita's pride and desire to keep his sister innocent. Key's right, by the way. All you need to do is change the names of the leads, and you get a memoir from the original author. Same with Barefoot Gen, oddly enough. I agree with a lot of your sentiments on death in a story.
I don't mind the use of red shirts. What I don't want is death for it's own sake. I'll use an example of what not to do from what little I read of Elfen Lied. In the very beginning, there's this secretary character whose non-personality is ~lol clumsy~. She exists only to be killed off by Lucy, yet the author wants you to be sad when she does die. I don't sympathize with her because of how pointless her existence ultimately was. If I were to swap her out for another red shirt, nothing would change that would matter. To sum it up? The secretary was a waste of paper. So, if you're going to kill off a character, you need to think hard about WHY. Otherwise, it'll be gratuitous. Write a story first, then a tearjerker second. That's all I want. |
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jl07045
 Posts: 1527 Location: Riga, Latvia |
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And I sympathize with her, because I don't need to know much about the character to feel sad when someone is in the wrong place in the wrong time. She had enough personality for that. What rubbed me the wrong way was how it was portrayed, not that she died.
It's a metaphor and is necessarily hyperbolic. It works quite well as that. |
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Akane the Catgirl
Posts: 1091 Location: LA, Baby! |
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^ I thought I just said that. See, it's easy to sympathize with a bit character whose death came about due to unfortunate circumstances. Everyone remembers the poor Toon shoe from the Roger Rabbit movie. We all know about how he went out. The difference between that and the secretary's fate was that the Toon shoe's death had a point (which was to introduce the Dip and establish Judge Doom's character as a ruthless executioner), while the secretary's death was redundant in purpose and pointless in the long-term. What happened to her was horrible, but I don't personally care about HER.
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khd
Posts: 1 |
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This anime happened to get released pretty much in the wake of Sept. 11, and cane at the exact moment that there was a craving for this sort of story plotting. The stuff where adults are idiots and everything in the world actually revolves around some kids and their little mental windows on the world. The plot told the audience exactly what they wanted to hear: the world is full of chaos you won't understand, so just concentrate on yourself.
But with 15 years or so of world events having gone by we all found that the world didn't actually come to an end, which diluted the context the show's popularity drew on. It's a product of it's time, never to feel "fresh" again. |
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jl07045
Posts: 1527 Location: Riga, Latvia |
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The point was to show Lucy's rampage and how innocent people get caught up in it. I don't know where you're getting at that you're supposed to care for her more than just a random goofy girl. Obviously they milked it as hard as they could, which was what I didn't like, but the death is not pointless or redundant, it belongs to the kind of scene they wanted to create. Most people won't have the same reaction to dead security personnel and other people directly involved with keeping her imprisoned. |
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Akane the Catgirl
Posts: 1091 Location: LA, Baby! |
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^ You have a good point. Now that I think about it, the problem with the secretary is that the story makes her out to be more important than she actually is. There's a scene before her death that attempts to make her sympathetic by giving her a backstory and a goal of "best secretary EVAR", but it's pointless because her only purpose was to die. If her onscreen appearance was limited to just her death scene, it'd get the point across and not be gratuitous in execution.
...wait, wasn't this thread about something else...? |
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Key
Moderator
 Posts: 18252 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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Since Zac made the quality of the death scenes a major point in his review, you haven't strayed enough yet to be a problem.
And yeah, I always thought the secretary's death in EL was dumb (and this is not really a spoiler because it happens within the first 5-6 minutes of the series) but it still had specific impact for various reasons, some already mentioned: a) she wasn't a faceless/nameless character, b) it emphasized Lucy's ruthlessness, c) it specifically got the goat of the guy in charge in that scene, and d) you just don't ever see characters like that used that way, in anime or not. (Think about it: when someone is used as a human shield, it's always a male character and usually a soldier, security guard, or police-type.) Of course, it also just comes down to base shock value, as that's EL's specialty; it really has no anime equal on that. As a side point, I've sometimes wondered if EL wasn't intended as a specific abuse of the nascent moe trend at the time, whereas Saikano was a clear promotion of it. |
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jr240483
 Posts: 4388 Location: New York City,New York,USA |
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luckily its not. i watched it back when viz had the license and while the ending definitely left something to be desired cause it was too reminiscent of the end of evangelion movie and X:1999's endings but it was a very good tragic love story to say the least. kinda like this ugly yet beautiful world but without the harem aspect. |
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kotomikun
Posts: 1205 |
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I'm probably the only one who feels this way, but even though I loved Madoka, I found Fate/Zero nearly intolerable. Well-written, but so consistently ultra-tragic that it's pretty much pointless (partly a symptom of it being a prequel). Kiritsugu, in particular, gets dragged through the mud so much it's almost comical. spoiler[His girlfriend turns into a zombie due to his dad's illicit magicking, so he kills his dad, and a random zombie killer becomes his "mother." After he grows up she gets stuck on a plane full of zombies, which he has to blow up with a rocket launcher. His homunculus wife dies and turns into a corrupted monster, somehow (as in there's a dead one and a separate evilified one), and he never sees his child again. His sorta-mistress... yep, she dies too. And after he has to destroy the thing he was working towards all this time, he gets some nondescript illness to kill him off before Fate/Stay Night comes around.] That's not even getting into the other characters, who have death and tragedy dumped on them in inverse proportion to their evilness. spoiler[Caster and his master do eventually die, but they weren't evil so much as murder-fetish sociopaths. Kiritsugu manages to kill some of the nastier characters, but usually through acts of highly questionable morality.] I'm just not sure what I was supposed to get out of it, other than an overdose of cynicism. |
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Stratum
 Posts: 42 |
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It's possible that I misinterpreted what you meant.
This sounded to me like an over simplified dismissal of I put for #2. Perhaps an example would've been clearer.
I interpreted it as more shock value then sad. Since I consider shock value to be cheap emotional manipulation so I didn't care it either, but I try to tolerate it for the other reason's that Key stated. |
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Gina Szanboti
Posts: 11431 |
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Huh? Women and children are used as human shields all the time. "Drop your weapon or the girl gets it!"  It's how Seras ended up a vampire. But I will grant you that women are less often the shield if the shield is to be killed off.
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Key
Moderator
Posts: 18252 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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Yeah, that's what I actually meant to say. And yes, Seras Victoria is an exception, but an extremely rare one. |
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Allen_ST
Posts: 15 |
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I disagree. To me, the whole shtick of putting "porno" at the end of a certain term like "Torture porn" just seems silly. |
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Jose Cruz
 Posts: 1779 Location: South America |
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I partially disagree with the review. I like the more organic looking low-resolution visuals, I love the music and I had a powerful emotional response from it. Though it's true that it's "tragedy porn", because it doesn't have essentially much else going for it so if you don't buy the character development going on you are just going to dislike it. Like K-On! is cuteness porn in a way.
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ebv2406
Posts: 54 |
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Great review, when I watched Saekano (back in 2006) I thought it was a great show up to the last episode which, not only I dislike but it also, made me take a look back and realize how bad it was.
This was the time when I was just starting to watch anime so I didn't have much experince, it drove me away from the drama genre so quite a while. |
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