Nice post!!
- Joined
- Nov 20, 2008
- Messages
- 10,066
Well, the MJP kids don't especially act like kids. That is, they don't act like kids who'd have the MJP backstory. How do you genetically engineer children to become soldiers and end up with anything but the main character from Gargantia? I guess if you are running a lousy super-soldier program.
That said, the MJP protagonists are pretty clearly meant to be a metaphor for the way Japan's current generation of teens and twenty-somethings feel about themselves. The characters play to that sense of helpless inadequacy, and the various ways it masks itself in a modern society.
So if the story ever really engages with that theme, then the characters are perfectly justified. If the story even was just a less sarcastic Nadesico, the main characters are perfectly justified. If the series tries to play things really straight, though, I'm not sure it'll work.
Yeah, Gundam-- especially recent Gundam-- tends to have fairly weak and generic protagonists. I would say you could generalize that to almost any series with a high price tag, honestly. Production committees right now are really timid and desperately afraid of properties not being popular.
That said, the MJP protagonists are pretty clearly meant to be a metaphor for the way Japan's current generation of teens and twenty-somethings feel about themselves. The characters play to that sense of helpless inadequacy, and the various ways it masks itself in a modern society.
So if the story ever really engages with that theme, then the characters are perfectly justified. If the story even was just a less sarcastic Nadesico, the main characters are perfectly justified. If the series tries to play things really straight, though, I'm not sure it'll work.
Yeah, Gundam-- especially recent Gundam-- tends to have fairly weak and generic protagonists. I would say you could generalize that to almost any series with a high price tag, honestly. Production committees right now are really timid and desperately afraid of properties not being popular.