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Apr. 8th, 2010 11:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI only have one volume to go in Pluto now! I am still kind of boggled by this. Anyway, as of Volume 6 and 7, the series has reeeeeally ramped up the emotional impact, good lord. Will I be swinging by the bookstore today to purchase Volume 8? MAYBE.
I knew Gesicht was doomed, but I am still full of sorrow. Considering the structure of the story, I probably should not have been holding out hope for Epsilon, but I kept crossing my fingers! But I am not really surprised that he was doomed too. :( But damn that scene was heartwrenching, though.
(Speaking of Epsilon, though, I have to say - it is kind of hilarious how much of a total hippie he is. Long straight hippie hair! Super-strong pacifism! Love for all the little children of the earth! SOLAR ENERGY POWER! Ohhh Epsilon. On a more serious note, I also think it's interesting how much more Epsilon seems to use gestures to convey emotions than most of the other robots, with Atom and Uran being notable exceptions.)
I am so infinitely curious to read the original Greatest Robot On Earth story now and see how Pluto is handled there as a character, and how the Atom backstory is handled too.
I have to say, though - one drawback of reading so much Urasawa in a short time is that I am really starting to notice how much Naoki Urasawa loves using small children as a device to make us feel sad. Either it's horrible things happening to small children, or small children reacting in sorrow to the death of someone they care about - and don't get me wrong, it's certainly effective. But sometimes I can't help but feel that it's sort of a cheap shot. Of course we feel nervous for Brando and Epsilon; they have large groups of non-individualized small children depending on them!
Monster does this a lot too - I mean, in a lot of ways Monster focuses on the abuse of children much more than it focuses on children themselves, and that's a major theme of the series so I can't complain too much. But again in Monster, 'hordes of children' are often used as shorthand to tell us how we're supposed to feel - there's a bunch of kids who like Grimmer and are worried about him, and therefore we like Grimmer and are worried about him! Monster and Pluto kids never dislike a sympathetic character, and they never act like total brats, either. Sometimes they're damaged, and sometimes they're damaged beyond repair (thanks, Johan) but they aren't flawed. In some ways, Dieter is an exception to this - and you know how much I love Dieter, and I give him a pass because he's awesome - but his preturnaturally good judgment is used as shorthand for the rest of us as much as any other Urasawa kid. (Johan is the other exception. But Johan is a special case.)
I think this is one of the reasons 20th Century Boys continues to be my favorite, actually. Because the kids in 20th Century Boys aren't there to engage our shock by having horrible things done to them, and they aren't there to serve as angst-magnifying accessories to the adults' storylines. They're flawed, endearing, hilarious and non-idealized kids with their own personalities - you can even see that in the way that they're drawn; the 20th Century Boys children's faces are very individualized and not always traditionally 'cute', while you'll never come across a kid in Monster who doesn't have the same big eyes and round cheeks - and I love that ridiculously.
And hey, while I'm speaking of milking kids for angst . . . the robot children plotline is very sad, it is true, but I keep getting stuck on Fridge Logic here. What is up with the robot children? Robots don't grow! Do they get more parts added onto them as they age? Does their consciousness get transferred into larger bodies? And if so, what's the point of making the tiny bodies? Is it just so adult robots can have fake families? Does any of this get explained?
I knew Gesicht was doomed, but I am still full of sorrow. Considering the structure of the story, I probably should not have been holding out hope for Epsilon, but I kept crossing my fingers! But I am not really surprised that he was doomed too. :( But damn that scene was heartwrenching, though.
(Speaking of Epsilon, though, I have to say - it is kind of hilarious how much of a total hippie he is. Long straight hippie hair! Super-strong pacifism! Love for all the little children of the earth! SOLAR ENERGY POWER! Ohhh Epsilon. On a more serious note, I also think it's interesting how much more Epsilon seems to use gestures to convey emotions than most of the other robots, with Atom and Uran being notable exceptions.)
I am so infinitely curious to read the original Greatest Robot On Earth story now and see how Pluto is handled there as a character, and how the Atom backstory is handled too.
I have to say, though - one drawback of reading so much Urasawa in a short time is that I am really starting to notice how much Naoki Urasawa loves using small children as a device to make us feel sad. Either it's horrible things happening to small children, or small children reacting in sorrow to the death of someone they care about - and don't get me wrong, it's certainly effective. But sometimes I can't help but feel that it's sort of a cheap shot. Of course we feel nervous for Brando and Epsilon; they have large groups of non-individualized small children depending on them!
Monster does this a lot too - I mean, in a lot of ways Monster focuses on the abuse of children much more than it focuses on children themselves, and that's a major theme of the series so I can't complain too much. But again in Monster, 'hordes of children' are often used as shorthand to tell us how we're supposed to feel - there's a bunch of kids who like Grimmer and are worried about him, and therefore we like Grimmer and are worried about him! Monster and Pluto kids never dislike a sympathetic character, and they never act like total brats, either. Sometimes they're damaged, and sometimes they're damaged beyond repair (thanks, Johan) but they aren't flawed. In some ways, Dieter is an exception to this - and you know how much I love Dieter, and I give him a pass because he's awesome - but his preturnaturally good judgment is used as shorthand for the rest of us as much as any other Urasawa kid. (Johan is the other exception. But Johan is a special case.)
I think this is one of the reasons 20th Century Boys continues to be my favorite, actually. Because the kids in 20th Century Boys aren't there to engage our shock by having horrible things done to them, and they aren't there to serve as angst-magnifying accessories to the adults' storylines. They're flawed, endearing, hilarious and non-idealized kids with their own personalities - you can even see that in the way that they're drawn; the 20th Century Boys children's faces are very individualized and not always traditionally 'cute', while you'll never come across a kid in Monster who doesn't have the same big eyes and round cheeks - and I love that ridiculously.
And hey, while I'm speaking of milking kids for angst . . . the robot children plotline is very sad, it is true, but I keep getting stuck on Fridge Logic here. What is up with the robot children? Robots don't grow! Do they get more parts added onto them as they age? Does their consciousness get transferred into larger bodies? And if so, what's the point of making the tiny bodies? Is it just so adult robots can have fake families? Does any of this get explained?
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no subject
Date: 2010-04-08 05:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-08 05:42 pm (UTC)*nods* Yeah - and I think that, in general, he does better with kids when he has a chance to show them as adults as well. Because you can tell then that he has to think about them as characters with continuity and development and specific personalities and issues, rather than as Adorable Moppet #6. That's another reason the 20th Century Boys kids work so well, I think.
no subject
Date: 2010-04-09 04:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-09 01:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-04-27 12:50 am (UTC)No, the robot children never get explained. But this is my take on them. There's a scene in volume 8 where a robot picks up a smaller, broken model and calls it a "child," to the confusion of the human present. I think that the robot children are mostly just outdated, small models that humans have little use for employing. So the adoption process is actually a matter of matching the robot parents with a child that has been largely discarded but still functions. (Gesicht and Helena were actually denied in the formal adoption process, and I'd say that's because all the children up for adoption match up with less advanced models.) It may be possible for them to grow by being given some kinds of upgrades. And I imagine it started out with robots acting on the same impulse as in the scene I mentioned above, wanting to take care of discarded robots and imitating humans by constructing a family. Then the process became formalized.
And you have a good point about children being used as a shorthand for good and evil. (Though I would point out that Hans Haas, though he liked Gesicht, acted like a normal kid, and was even a brat at times. Part of the reason he though Gesicht was cool was "dude, he is a walking weapon!")
(Also, I totally held out hope for Epsilon too, even after volume 6 crushed my heart.)
no subject
Date: 2010-04-27 01:06 am (UTC)And I like this one particularly! The only thing that theory doesn't make sense with, for me, is the intuitive horror that even the anti-robot KKK have about the whole "you took apart robot children?" thing - because it doesn't seem to me that outdated small models would carry that much emotional weight with people who don't care about robots anyway - but then, I guess if you call something a child, and treat them as children, then the public will also react to them emotionally as children regardless of their actual origins.
(That's true! I did love when Hans Haas was being a brat - also as part of how much I loved Urasawa humanizing Haas with his totally ordinary family life.)
(Mine tooooo. ;_; I mean, I knew Gesicht was totally doomed, but maybe, I thought, maybe not everyone is! Even while knowing it was foolish.)
no subject
Date: 2010-04-27 01:21 am (UTC)Yeah, if the institution has been around long enough, and it probably has, it has to become difficult to disassociate from the impact of a word like "child." Plus, they might consider it an incredibly low blow in the "war" against robots.
(I have an inordinate amount of love for Ilsa Haas- she is the most normal human we see in the series!)
(Even knowing he's doomed, Gesicht's death is a punch in the gut. ;_; And then you're like "...maybe Urasawa won't make it worse? Maybe?" And then he does.)
no subject
Date: 2010-04-27 02:08 am (UTC)(She is! I kind of love her, too. It's not her fault her husband's sort of crazy.)
(Of course he does. Because it's Urasawa. - okay, to be fair, I guess Tezuka gets a little bit of the blame for that one too.)
no subject
Date: 2010-04-27 02:12 am (UTC)(She expresses a nice amount of exasperation and irritation with her husband.)
(gdit, Urasawa, why do you have to make us care so much just so you can kill them off?)