Forum - View topicREVIEW: Saga of Tanya the Evil
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Sakagami Tomoyo
 Posts: 940 Location: Melbourne, VIC, Australia |
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There's a couple of things wrong here. First, just because it's shown to work doesn't make it right. I could point to any number of real-world examples of blaming a particular religious or ethnic group for all of a nation's problems to unite the people. Would you say that a documentary or dramatisation of the rise of Naziism in Germany can't be an indictment on it because it worked? Second is that she "succeeds" only in the sense of scoring military victories and rising through the ranks, she consistently fails in her actual goal of securing a safe and peaceful position at the rear. Sure "rising to the top" is one of her goals, but that's as much means to and end as it is a goal in itself, and largely meaningless if it doesn't come with more safety than being a lowly Second Lieutenant on the front lines.
Correct, except that machine guns weren't that recently perfected - it's just that until then Europeans weren't using them on each other, they were using them on the natives in their respective colonies and hadn't yet adapted their military thinking to enemies that also had machine guns. Australians especially have a thing or two to say about signing up to fight in the Great War for the glory and the reality of what they got instead.
My protective instinct - already used to taking a backseat when young girls in anime go and kick some arse - stopped caring entirely when it became known that it's less a young girl and more a cynical, misanthropic middle-aged man in the shape of a young girl. But if it's a bridge too far for you, fair enough. |
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Key
Moderator
 Posts: 18188 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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While the underlined part of your statement is true, it's not the whole story. The Europeans had a chance to see machine gun-vs.-machine gun trench warfare in action almost a decade before WWI started, in the Russo-Japanese War. Sadly none of the top honchos in the European militaries heeded the warnings that the observers sent back to them and adjusted their tactics accordingly.
Yeah, I never had an issue with this, either, mostly because I understood right away that it was the soul of an adult in a little girl's body. I much prefer that scenario to an unbelievably-precocious actual little girl, which you see all too often in anime. |
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Zumie
 Posts: 51 |
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As a fan of Tanya the evil, I feel I should point out that she as said several times that she hates war, and thought the people she was serving were idiotic warmongers.
Secondly, her true goal is to get off the battlefield and just push papers, she even said this in like the first or second episode after she was shot out of the sky and sent to the hospital. She has no real interest in risking her life, but she has no choice mostly due to the fact that: She's an orphan and has no money, and is a lower class, she has an unusual talent for magic, she figured it would be the easiest way to get high up and get the easy life in some way either as at the back of the line or as a general possibly. She also mentioned she hated the Nazis, and the communists, and Japan imperialists as well. Like I said, she's pretty much forced into it, and because she is hard on her subordinates, it could be assumed that she behaved this way when she was a boss too. I mean, he was killed in the end as a result. I also kind of find it disturbing people equate her with naziism, especially since when her character stated she thought all the things associated with war were stupid. I don't think many people realized that in the end, nor that she doesn't believe in fascism, communism, or whatever- she's essentially a hard core capitalist. She's just using the system presented to her as a way to survive. |
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Sakagami Tomoyo
Posts: 940 Location: Melbourne, VIC, Australia |
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Believe me, Australians have some things to say about the European brass of the time, and none of it kind. |
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Lemonchest
Posts: 1771 |
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The show contradicts itself on that point. At first it says all mages are conscripted into the army. But later she's talking with one of her men & says she volunteered. Indeed, that's a contradiction at the heart of a lot of Tanya - wanting an "easy life" but always volunteering to charge headlong into battle, even disobeying orders to do so. She's a pretty typical LN protagonist in that regard, who all seem obligated to say "I just want a normal life" or "I don't want to get involved" before rushing to do so.. |
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Tuor_of_Gondolin
 Posts: 3524 Location: Bellevue, WA |
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It's not a contradiction. She volunteered the moment she found out she had exceptional magical ability. If she *hadn't* volunteered, she would've eventually been conscripted, and probably, like most conscripts, had a lot less of a say about her future in the military. Conscription usually has certain criteria involved: age, sex, skills, types of knowledge, etc. If you don't fall within those criteria, then you won't be conscripted, but you may still be able to volunteer. She was in a militaristic society, and she could see that war was coming. She hoped to get into a place that had a lot of bureaucracy, where it was possible to fly under the radar and build a small fiefdom. She has never wanted to gain too much rank. She didn't want to gain too much recognition. She likes being middle-management. For various reasons, her plans tend to go awry, but that doesn't change her oft-stated goals. |
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Gan_HOPE326
Posts: 31 |
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I agree with the many who take exception with calling Tanya and her not-Germany "Nazis". I feel like the reason for that is that people idealise a bit too much what non-fascist Western states were pre-WW2. People see nationalism, talk about "protecting the fatherland", and think Nazis, but that's not exactly accurate. In WW1 times, that was literally everyone. A whole war was fought between countries touting those kind of ideals; they pushed their people to die in the millions with those slogans. All of them, no exception. And this was also a time when all of them were extremely racist colonial powers who thought they were "bringing civilizations" to all those poor savage peoples. The white man's burden and all that. Antisemitism was also a very common sentiment.
By modern left-wing criteria, ironically, Nazis didn't do anything special because you would call EVERYONE a Nazi, back then. The point is, Nazis simply took all this shit to its next logical conclusion, and that ended up being so horrifying that it forced everyone else to question it. Nationalism alone doesn't count as Nazism, and at the very least, if you're looking only at members of the military in a time of war, you're also getting a very skewed impression of what the general ideology is. Of course they're going to spout nationalist talk, how do you motivate people to go and die on the battlefield, otherwise, by justifying it with tiny economic advantages that the country will gain for it? But is nationalism the official state ideology? Is it enforced? Is dissent repressed violently? If it is, was it in peacetime as well? And so on. All these things mark the difference between a Nazi state and an "ordinary" early XX century European capitalistic power. |
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HeeroTX
Posts: 2046 Location: Austin, TX |
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It is pretty firmly established that Tanya is an analogue for the Red Baron, who while German, was not a "nazi" and was even well respected by his opponents (generally speaking). If you're going to give Tanya crap for promoting Nazi-ism, then I think you need to highlight your specific problems with Nazi-ism. That's not to say I think the nazis were laudable, but generally their PRIMARY "evil" to most people was their ethnic cleansing, which Tanya's nation shows no indication of practicing. If you're taking issue with their militaristic demeanor, their keen fashion sense, their advanced technological prowess regarding military power. None of those things were unique to Nazi Germany and pretty much ANY nation that was ever a military power could be subject to scrutiny for them. (possibly excepting the fashion bit) If you're arguing "war-like Germany-analogue = Nazis", then that's just ignorant.
While I agree there's some moments of contradiction with Tanya herself, the disobeying orders part I don't think fits simply because she realizes that if she succeeds at what she wants to do at that moment, then the war is (probably) "over", whereas if things go as they do she's stuck to continue fighting for who knows how long. It's a calculated risk to MINIMIZE the fighting. It also just gives Tanya the opportunity to explain how the inciting action from the beginning taught her lessons that still inform her decisions later. |
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Shiroi Hane
Encyclopedia Editor
 Posts: 7580 Location: Wales |
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Visha was conscripted, and oddly it is why Tanya has more respect for her than the two volunteers who accompanied her (although I don't entirely understand why; I read part of a fan translation after buying the first ebook but I could not understand the reasoning here - hopefully Yen Press will do a better job). One thing Tanya mentioned repeatedly in the anime was that the Imperial military is a meritocracy - if you can do the job then age, gender (and a degree of insanity in the case of the Schugel) are irrelevant. Although, something the anime did skip is that female cadets get preferential treatment since the rules were all set up at a time when the only females in the military were nobles... [fixed quotes] Last edited by Shiroi Hane on Fri Jul 28, 2017 1:59 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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Jose Cruz
 Posts: 1773 Location: South America |
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@HeeroTX, besides ethnic cleasing one other thing that distinguishes Nazis from most other historical powers was their complete disregard for the sovereignty of all other countries as they aggressively invaded nearly 30 countries or so over a period of 3-4 years. While other countries did the same from time to time (the US more recently invaded Iraq for instance) the Nazis were the only ones to do so repeatedly and aggressively as if they were trying to mimic Alexander the Great's conquests, althought Stalin also took advantage of WW2 to invade a dozen coutries his conquests were made on the basis of "liberation" from the Nazis, and so to a degree sligthly less imoral.
So far in the anime Tanya's country's actions did not involve the aggressive disregard for the sovereignty of other countries but a more sophisticated understanding of geopolitical reality kinda like WW1 Germany.
I also found it very weird, I was expecting an A. It's a great show, one of my favorite animations of 2017. And what a great year this is. I really liked Tanya's villainous style, because this moralizing you see in most movies/shows is really annoying as they are insulting the audience's intelligence. Here we have something that's clearly evil but still doesn't tell us into our faces: "look it's EVIL", also a war like WW1 had virtually no heroes it was just a general imoral carnage. Tanya is a good character to embody that being without any sense of moral purpos and entirely selfish. |
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