Forum - View topicEP. REVIEW: Yūki Yūna wa Yūsha de Aru
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Yttrbio
 Posts: 3652 |
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ChibiKangaroo, fundamentally, there's nothing "rational" about avoiding the death of the world. Keep digging, and eventually you'll find an irrational axiom in any belief structure. You're essentially saying she's wrong according to a belief structure she doesn't subscribe to. That doesn't make her insane, or a bad decision-maker, it makes her immoral (from your perspective).
It's one thing to say that setting out to destroy the world in a fit of rage is outrageously nuts. But if the survival of the world is predicated on your eternal suffering, as it is in this case, I don't think the "automatic morality" rules that say destroying the world is bad necessarily apply. |
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ChibiKangaroo
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You don't need to go to morals to explain the concept of survival. The concept of survival is hard-wired into every living creature. It is one of the few, most pure necessities that every living thing is compelled to do. Survive and procreate. That's it. Those are the two most logical things that any living creature can do. Survive and procreate. The logic behind those two paramount concepts is unimpeachable, under infinite lines of reasoning. The value of survival is beyond comprehension in fact. Life is infinitesimally short. Death is eternal. Therefore, life must be maintained and extended at all costs. While one is alive, virtually anything can be done. Suffering, societal ills, structural problems - all of these things can conceivably be solved while one is alive. When one is dead, logically, there is only the void. Thus, again, logic demands that life be extended even if one is suffering, because suffering can be solved while one is alive. Again, the logic of life is perfect. There are few equals in their logical purity. Thus, her actions are illogical/irrational, in addition to being idiotic. |
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Yttrbio
Posts: 3652 |
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Edit; deleted a long post that didn't have much to do with anything.
To be brief, I treat rationality and sanity as things that are relative to an individual's situation and her values. While most people value life, they also value other things, and I think one can try to achieve these other things and still be considered "sane." You seem to have a different definition of rationality, so feel free to adjust what I said to fit your definitions. |
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ChibiKangaroo
Posts: 2941 |
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It is a consequence of many things - physics, biology, and rationality. Rationality encapsulates all of them though. For example - if one were to not eat, biology says that this will cause one pain. However, what does it matter if one feels pain or not? Our intellect (not our morals) helps us to recognize that pain is bad. Pain interferes with our other functions. It prevents us from functioning at 100% capacity. Thus, pain must be eradicated. However, what is the best way for one to eradicate this "pain?" Again, that is a rational decision. One decides to eat something to stop the pain, and one will look for (and choose) a sufficient nutrient to eradicate the pain. People do this. Animals do this. Every living creature does it. You claim that animals have no rational abilities. However, what proof do you have of that? None. That is a social concept that we have decided - essentially a "moral" judgment. Pure logic would dictate that any creature with the same principle needs as us would perform the same actions as us, including making rational decisions. Those decisions include eating to stop the pain and most importantly, surviving and procreating. They will take logical actions that best allow them to survive and procreate, just as we will. Whether society vanishes or not is a separate question. That has nothing to do with individual survival and procreation. Does morality have anything to do with the way our bodies are constructed? Does morality dictate our genetics, or our reproductive systems? That has nothing to do with morality. However, there are MANY kinds of logic to these things. Logically, procreating means that there are additional bodies and minds to assist us in survival. You also bring in the issue of suicide. Well, you are essentially just bringing us full circle. Togo's actions are suicidal. We have already posited that suicide is irrational. So claiming that life is not logical because irrational people commit suicide is a very strange type of circular argument. The solution has already been given. Suicidal people ARE irrational because life IS logical 
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HaruhiToy
 Posts: 4118 |
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Tojo is clearly gone off the deep end -- why would someone expect rationality in her actions and spend so much time to try to find it?
It is possible she is under the impression, rational or not, that she can change the system by destroying the Shinji and still preserve her friends and the Hero Club, but I didn't see any lines of dialog to indicate that this is what she was attempting. The bigger issue is that it looks to me like their entire world is doomed sooner or later anyway regardless of what the Heroes do or not do. The tree-gods are defending a siege action with limited resources against what appears to be a limitless universe of vertex creatures. It is also possible that Tojo realized that and despair is part of what is driving her. |
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mangamuscle
Posts: 2658 Location: Mexico |
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From what I understand from the subtitles of episode 10, this siege has been going for about 2000 years. We do not know if the world has been destroyed little by little or if it was wiped in the blink of an eye, nevertheless this is a more hopeful scenario than say Muv-Luv Alternative: Total Eclipse since you only need to sacrifice less than a dozen people to save a whole nation, no war in mankind's history has been so benign. Whether this siege can continue for another 2000 years or not is anybodies guess (yes, the giant vertex regenerated in a few weeks time, but maybe they need several years to punch a whole into the shinju's protection field). We might call the Taisha system immoral, but it is not less immoral than any military, I want to hear some USA citizen bad mouth their military because their waste of human lives makes the Taisha look tame, Do not forget that what we see here is nowadays par for the course, many of the soldiers returning from the battlefield are alive but terribly disabled, not only they might loose memories from brain trauma, sometimes they can't even make a damned multiplication because a grenade left heir brains like egg yolks, but nobody tells you that when you sign in. |
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Dark Mac
Posts: 313 |
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If you guys are curious, the show's actually based on a little philosophical question posed by William James in his "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life". Ursula K Le Guin also explores it in "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas". He says:
"Or if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs. Fourier's and Bellamy's and Morris's utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture, what except a specifical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain?" |
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HaruhiToy
Posts: 4118 |
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That's a good quote Dark Mac. However I do think there is a difference in informed culpability and where the beneficiaries have no idea of what is going on. In other words the Taisha versus the general citizenry like the Hero Club's classmates.
As presented so far the Taisha's gods are benevolent for humankind and selfless in their actions. However I still question that even though as the episodes grind on my suspicion that the are not as good as they seem has less to stand on. They could very well turn out to be the bad actors in how the universe ended up like this. We'll just have to wait and see. |
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Tenebrae
Posts: 486 |
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Well with just one episode to go my theory of Sonoko possibly being an active participant won't come true.
What Togo is giving her answer to here is the classic question of "is the happiness of many woth the sacrifice of few." Many shows and games go about asking this question. It is worth nothing that the heroes' answer - before considering what they need to do - is "no, nobody is going to die" pretty much all of the time, and they would call the status quo as a rotten system. Togo's actions however are more in line with the noble villain archetype who determines to bring everything down to put a stop to it. |
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ChibiKangaroo
Posts: 2941 |
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So I think I have figured out why this show is only so-so for me. I suppose this isn't some big reveal, as we've been making the Madoka comparisons for a while now, but I think the issue with this show is that it is like Madoka without Kyubey and Homura.
Every time I've talked about Madoka, I am like a broken record. I constantly say that I wouldn't rate Madoka very high if it weren't for Kyubey and Homura. None of the other characters in Madoka really mattered. Those two made the entire show. I feel totally comfortable in saying that. However, this show uses a lot of the similar concepts but it doesn't have those two characters. Therefore, it isn't as compelling. When I think about the other characters from Madoka (the titular character, Sayaka, Kyoko, Mami) I felt like they were essentially plot devices. They were parts of a puzzle, but not players in the game so to speak. Kyubey and Homura were the players. I feel like all the characters from Yuki Yuna are pieces of a puzzle. None of them stands out as a player to me. (Ideally, every major character should be a "player"). Even Togo, who by all rights should be a player by this point, she also just feels like a puzzle piece. Next episode, we will see what picture is formed by this puzzle. It might be kind of pretty. It might be sad. It might be a "reset" where hope is restored for all. Each girl will fit her role in that puzzle, and then the show will end. It would be nice if I were wrong, but I'm not seeing anything else at this point. |
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Key
Moderator
 Posts: 18186 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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I found the absence of Kyubey or a Kyubey-like character to be a major plus, though. That takes a clear villain/manipulator character out of the picture and forces the girls to discover things on their own rather than having things directly revealed to them (and us). That dramatically changes the tenor of the series.
The other major difference (in comparing to PMMM) that I feel is a major plus is that the focus here has always been on the girls as a mutually supportive group rather than as individuals. PMMM always specifically thwarted any firm establishment of a group dynamic in favor of either individual bonding or purely acting as individuals. In retrospect that was what always bothered me the most about PMMM, but I couldn't put my finger on it until I saw Yuki Yuna and saw how the "combat magical girl" approach could be handled differently if the whole focus was on establishing that strong sense of camaraderie. That is, I think, part of the reason why I felt that Mimori becoming a magical girl in episode 2, rather than being left on the fringe for most of the series (as Madoka was in PMMM), was such a critical turning point: because it kept the group intact on the battle front as well as the school and social fronts. I also don't think it's a coincidence that both this one and Hanayamata are in my top 5 for the year, because it is the other series this year which had close to that degree of bonding amongst its core cast members. |
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ChibiKangaroo
Posts: 2941 |
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I should probably clarify that I didn't mean that the show needed to have the exact Kyubey character (or some approximation of him). If you think about it, the Taisha is essentially a very vague, shadowy type of "version" of that type of manipulator character. What I meant is that the show is missing a character of his caliber (whether good, evil, or neutral). It doesn't have a character who has some broader perspective or some kind of vision and attempts to achieve that destiny through shaping the other "puzzle pieces" appropriately. That is a Kyubey or Homura. It is an active character role. I feel like that is missing from this show. All of the characters here are passive roles, like the rest of the characters from PMMM. It seems like maybe the writers wanted to try and transition Togo into such an active role at the very end, but maybe it's too late. I don't know. Or it could be that the way they are trying to do it makes her feel like a cheap device. She just goes insane and lashes out wildly at the Taisha and her friends. There's no vision in it. It's not a clear-cut goal. It's just, "Destroy everything." As I indicated earlier, this makes her feel like just another puzzle piece. "The girl who goes insane and tries to blow up the entire world, and needs to be calmed down, defeated, or brought back to the good side." That's a plot device. Something to be resolved in the final episode.
I agree with this 100%. I think Madoka was a terrible leading character. I know it's heresy to say that. I know that me even uttering that phrase is like the sound of a battle horn blaring and that throngs of Madoka disciples will hear it and rise up to battle, and will declare that she is the most perfect main character ever created and that god Madoka is their personal savior. But I'll say it again, Madoka was an awful main character. Primarily, this was due to the way the show had her sitting on the sidelines for the entire time, not working/fighting alongside her friends, making her the ultimate example of a passive character role. She had no voice, no vision, and no real comradery with the other girls until the very end. I thank god that Yuki Yuna wasn't stupid enough to do something like that with any of its characters. That's not to say I think the characters here were active, as I said earlier, I think they were still passive, but at least they did have the comradery for the entire series (as you mentioned above). That did give this show some emotional weight that Madoka was sorely lacking. For me, Madoka's genius was in the way it used its two real leads (Kyubey and Homura) to play with the audience's expectations and (to a certain degree) re-write perceptions about how a magical girl story should go. It's not the only show to do that, but it did that exceptionally well. However, I felt virtually nothing emotionally from Madoka. I have felt a lot of emotional impact from Yuki Yuna. There, it is superior to Madoka. The interaction and comradery between the girls and the weight of their suffering feels real to me where it felt sort of "meh" in Madoka. As I've said before, I think there is a much more powerful Moe element at work in Yuki Yuna that eclipses anything Madoka had going for it, so that's part of where the emotional weight is coming from. But yes, I certainly agree with you that that aspect of Yuki Yuna far surpasses Madoka. Again though, I am still left with the problem of the active vs. passive characters. I feel like there are very few truly great works that have all passive characters. Maybe it is the 12 episode run time that caused the writers here to give us all passive characters... but Madoka did have 2 active characters even in that short run time. Maybe Yuki Yuna couldn't accomplish that AND have the comradery/emotional weight to it in that run time? I don't know. Like I said, by all rights Togo should have been established very early on as an active character but she wasn't. I feel like that was a huge waste. I don't think we will see another character like her in a long time. She should have been used to her full potential here. |
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Actar
 Posts: 1074 Location: Singapore |
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[Episode 12]
My knee-jerk reaction was like many others'. "How could they break their own rules?! Desu ex machina! Rage, rage, rage!" However, giving it some time and thinking it over, I actually believe that the series and ending is much smarter than what we're giving it credit for. Everything was foreshadowed and makes sense within the context of the universe that they have built. Even the return of their sacrifices was foreshadowed in the beach episode. Yes, it does end on a positive note and it does SEEM to deny us our catharsis with regard to allegedly "cheapening" their sacrifices, but did it really cheapen anything? Like us, the girls were not cognizant of the fact that they would ever heal, but they still fought their hardest and effected change. Think about it, the Shinjuu creates weaknesses in the Barrier to let Vertexes in and Tougou was just doing the same on a far larger scale, leading to the destruction of a ton of them. By crippling the Vertexes, they themselves single-handedly ended the cycle of the Shinjuu having to rely on them as safeguards. It's actually a legitimate positive plot twist as opposed to a traditional negative one. Wonder why we don't instantly react to those as well as negative ones... As mentioned in in the show itself, the Mankai is not only a boost in power for a limited time, it's a level-up system where they get more powerful for the remainder of their hero lives. So it's not a case of "but you used the great power already and still got back your sacrifice" but fair exchange. By relieving them of their hero duties and access to great power, they got their sacrifices back. Also, Yuuna did lie to Tougou about not forgetting her. People are right to say that she had no precedence to make that statement. However, thinking about it, that was pretty much the only thing that she could say to calm Togo down. |
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Zilan
Posts: 167 |
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Best show of the season. Can't wait to purchase it.
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Megiddo
 Posts: 8360 Location: IL |
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Okay cool then, so I can go to you for answers since apparently you have realized how the writers didn't pull this garbage ending out of their behind. In what way in form was it foreshadowed that the faeries could apparently just disappear and thus free the girls from their forced servitude? Because from my eye, that just came out of nowhere for no reason without explanation. But hey, if you've think you can explain it to me so that it was within the boundaries of what the show had laid out then I am all ears to be informed. |
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