#is flagged with a correction? i'm not sure this really meets the criteria for unreliable narration of the story itself
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coquelicoq · 3 years ago
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one thing i really love about cherry magic is its use of the unreliable narrator trope. the narrator's skewed view of himself and the people around him makes him personally an unreliable source of information about his world, but for the majority of the show, every time he tells us something biased, he's immediately corrected by another source. because of the magic, we and the narrator are continuously exposed to information that contradicts what the narrator is telling us/himself, and as this continues to happen it allows us to develop a distance from the narrator's perspective that it's much harder for the narrator himself to achieve.
this in itself isn't i would say a very uncommon way for the unreliable narrator device to be used, but what i like about it here is that the whole point of the show, the main character arc imo, is for the narrator to realize and work on correcting his unreliability - to accept that the story he tends to tell himself about his life is faulty and to learn how to tell a new story. so often an unreliable narrator is used to create a sense of mystery for the reader - what's really going on? what can be trusted? are we being lied to or is the narrator misinformed? - and i love that usage, but here what's so fun about it is that there is no mystery whatsoever. we know that adachi is misguided, in general and in each specific moment. the pull of this story is very much character-driven and comes from watching him struggle to change his worldview, in the exact same way that any person with a skewed self-image due to low self-worth has difficulty believing they're lovable and other people are fallible just like they are. so in that way the magic (the anti-unreliable narrator) is the perfect device for telling a story with that arc.
i love an unreliable narrator story that has something to say about the unreliability of the stories that other people tell us. but more than that i love a story about the unreliability of the stories we tell ourselves. there's an uplifting humility in that, when the story we tell ourselves is that we're worthless. how can we know that? do we have access to the information we would need to make that assessment? we think we're worthless but also omniscient? cherry magic reveals this thinking as the absurdity that it is. i think that's why this show, despite its truly unfortunate name and general premise lmao, has such staying power for me.
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