#kraftpunk2763

[gamesception]

Comments from Kraftpunk

I'm not mad about it - just disappointed. I have tried to stress that Saito's not at fault for these characters & themes being missing. She didn't 'take them out' of the manga, rather it seems Ikuhara 'added them to' the anime. Having watched the anime first though, yeah, it's hard not to be disappointed that several of my favorite aspects from that version just aren't here. It's worth pointing out that I liked the 'Adolescence of Utena' movie despite many of those same aspects being missing, because I found the stuff the movie did instead to be compelling in its own right. I'm just not far enough into the manga yet to see what what its unique aspects are yet, hopefully when I do I'll be won over here as well.

I did not at all mean to imply you were making anything up, so I absolutely apologize for that. And thank you very much for the tip off towards Ursula's Kiss. I was able to find out more about it here: https://empty-movement.tumblr.com/post/168658185929

From some of Chijo Saito's scetches and design work it seems that early concepts for what would later become RGU were much closer to sailor moon, with an entire team of magical girls fighting a team of apocalyptic maybe-space-based bad guys. Of this early concept, it seems the only things that survived were the name of the main character Utena, that she was saved by a mysterious prince as a little girl and decided to become prince-like herself, that the mysterious prince went missing and is maybe one of the villains now, and many character designs - though the one eventually used for Utena was originally one of the other girls on the team. But there's no Anthy, which makes it hard to call it an early version of the same story so much as a different story that never went anywhere and had it's aesthetics and main character backstory later repurposed for the story we know.

The Ursula's Kiss stuff is a weird bundle, a proposed English localization of the anime that never happened. Thankfully so, as it features some of the less favorable tropes of 90s localizations, including random name changes and such. What we see on the web page has to have been put together pretty late in production actually, since from the episode summaries they have to have either had the entire finished anime or at least the full scripts to work with, because there's scene by scene summaries all the way to the last episode. But they also were given seemingly long abandoned stuff from the early story described above that didn't make it into the anime or the manga. And looking at Juri specifically is an absolute hodge podge, as they've got some of the 'Team Eleganza' stuff where neither Touga nor Shiori exists, her character bio is from the manga (likes Touga, antagonistic to Utena), but episode summaries are from the anime, including directly stating that Juri has a 'secret crush' on Shiori. It seems Enoki films was just handed a hodge podge of early concept, manga, and anime stuff, much of it unrelated, and just told to do whatever.

Really interesting artefacts none the less, especially the early sketch concept stuff. Thank you again to kraftpunk for pointing me to it all!

[darstellunge]

@kraftpunk2763 replied to your post “I remember seeing a post that had something like...”:

do u think that there's a narrative reason that people die in real life?

​Real life and fiction are different things, though. Characters in fiction are just narrative tools. And important characters are usually not killed off for nothing.

Sure, some authors may not think things through as much, but death is usually used for at least some purpose in fiction - to say something about the dying character and their circumstances (usually when they cause their own death in one way or another - good examples of that would be Boromir, Denethor and Gollum from Lord of The Rings) or about the people who have to deal with their death (Nanbu from NOMAD is a great example of such case), or to give the motivation to another character or otherwise move the plot in the needed direction (the usual "someone killed my wife and now I have to avenge her" trope, for example), or even if to just get rid of the character whose presence may make the later choices that the author wants to make in the story make less sense (which is why I tried to figure out if it could be the case with Grimmer in my post), or they just don't want to have that character in the story anymore for some other reason. Or sometimes it may be done purely for the sake of drama and/or raising the stakes, but I doubt that someone with such thought-out and detailed writing as Urasawa would do something like that to such an important character, especially at that point in the story - it was already pretty intense at that point, there hardly was a need for further escalation, especially considering the upcoming showdown with Johan. And, yes, sometimes the point itself can be "sometimes death just happens, because that's how life is", but that would make absolutely no sense in this case. That kind of stuff is usually reserved for the cases where what's explored in the story is the reactions of the other characters to something like that happening.

Like I said in the tags to my post, I have absolutely no problems with characters dying in fiction. In fact, one of my all-time-favourite stories is in big part about a character trying to deal with the death of another character who was important to them, and in the end dying themselves. But both of those deaths made sense in-universe AND narratively, as they were the logical end points of their respective character arcs and their choices and circumstances.

So, being familiar with Urasawa's writing in general (and even just looking at all other deaths in Monster), I do believe that he must have had at least some reason to kill Grimmer off. I just struggle to see that reason myself, but that may be just because I missed something, which is why I made the post basically asking for help from the fellow fans - because at least someone claimed that they understood the meaning behind that decision, and I want to understand it too. Because not understanding the meaning behind something like that means that I don't understand something about the story and/or the character, and I don't want to just leave it like that if there's a possibility to figure it out.

[darstellunge]

@kraftpunk2763 replied to your post “@kraftpunk2763 replied to your post “I remember...”:

sometimes ppl die in fiction to emphasize the fact that life isn't fair. or just for drama. for instance, the character D'Angelo Barksdale from the show The Wire is strangled to death in s2. it feels like a narrative waste, but the point was that ppl like him die all the time in real life and no one cares Grimmer died right after regaining his emotions for drama and because his narrative arc was over and to hammer in the tragedy and unfairness of his life

Again, yes, in certain cases such kinds of explanations could be possible.

I just don't think they would make sense in this specific case - especially "to emphasize the fact that life isn't fair", since that would be spitting in the face of the entire character arc of Grimmer. Both he and Roberto went through the hell of Kinderheim 511, which on its own is already a big "sometimes life fucks people over", but the point was in what they choose to do with it and how to live their lives after that - and the difference in what they became is a pretty big point in Monster in itself. Doing it again to "show unfairness of life" after those points were already made doesn't make much sense.

As for the drama - I think Urasawa's writing is more nuanced, and I don't think he would resort to such cheap tricks just for the sake of drama. And like I said, at that point in the story there was no real need for a further escalation in that aspect - the stakes were already high, the mood was already grim, shit already hit the fan pretty severely.

I could see it being a "two birds with one stone" situation - as in "to convey something else AND for the drama" - but in that case what interests me is what was that "something else" that Urasawa intended. I already went through my reasons why the possibilities of what it could be that I could think of just wouldn't make much sense (or at least why it wouldn't make sense to take it that far), so for now I ran out of ideas.

Recently I also saw a theory that Grimmer's emotions about the death of his son coming back in the end would likely mean the rest of the emotions about everything else that happened in his life would also come back if he stayed alive, and that would probably be pretty hellish, so that was basically a mercy kill - and while I see it as somewhat of a stretch since we don't really know how hard it actually would be on Grimmer, it still would be a better explanation that "just for the sake of drama".