Understood. I see your point. Yeah, the side characters in this time haven’t done much either.
I think I’d have rather followed Mashiro post-rape. Like okay, somehow she escapes. Now she’s on the run or building a resistance inside the dominator home world. We’re hiding underground. It’s now no longer a mecha manga, and that also means that when win finds Mashiro, mashiro isn’t there. So that’s not what’s going to happen.
But I like the idea of the underground resistance always on the run and doing guerrilla warfare with no mechs against this empire. There’s a bigger sense of dread/tension on every mission. Maybe their cover/disguise gets blown. Maybe someone finds the hideout. Maybe someone in the resistance is a spy. Etc. you got caught once, it can happen again. The way you escaped last time…the dominators fixed that particular flaw. The same trick won’t work again. Maybe you won’t escape next time. Etc.
Having Mashiro still be the lead after being raped/captured gives us much more emotion. It allows us to see a new aspect of her character. How does she deal with this? Like, it’s a bad thing in hentai where rape is just a thing that is either completely glossed over and the characters just move on like nothing happened, or the victim is just immediately a mind-broken slave. There isn’t much dealing with how victims of trauma deal with trauma. Even Beserk, the story that people say uses rape the best for Guys’ motivation, still just made Casca completely nonexistent as a character for 20+ years and failed to develop her. You could have told the story of a survivor going through the difficult process of overcoming what happened. We could see that process, instead of what I fear will happen: that we skip straight to the end.
And you can have the “I sense win is alive” as this thing in the background. She’s sending out secret messages. There’s signs that maybe win is… but no win isn’t. People start to doubt Mashiro. Maybe she’s gone a little crazy. Maybe she can’t deal with the “fact” that win is dead. Maybe it’s better if someone else took over the group. Etc etc.
God damn, I know that there’s the “I made this up so I like it better” fallacy but doesn’t that sound more interesting than everything win has done thus far?
I really think switching away from Mashiro was a mistake. Even if the end result of the OG series was she gets captured, you could have still followed her post-capture.
It also doesn’t help that win as a human acts nothing like win as a mecha. Complete character assassination there. Like, you could have had the “crusty old veteran” aspect of her in the body of a girl as a purposeful clash between looks and being. Instead they just cut that aspect out entirely.
Sigh.
Edit: one more idea… which will likely happened eventually anyway. Part of Mashiro’s journey can be reuniting with dark Mashiro.
I think I’d have rather followed Mashiro post-rape. Like okay, somehow she escapes. Now she’s on the run or building a resistance inside the dominator home world. We’re hiding underground. It’s now no longer a mecha manga, and that also means that when win finds Mashiro, mashiro isn’t there. So that’s not what’s going to happen.
But I like the idea of the underground resistance always on the run and doing guerrilla warfare with no mechs against this empire. There’s a bigger sense of dread/tension on every mission. Maybe their cover/disguise gets blown. Maybe someone finds the hideout. Maybe someone in the resistance is a spy. Etc. you got caught once, it can happen again. The way you escaped last time…the dominators fixed that particular flaw. The same trick won’t work again. Maybe you won’t escape next time. Etc.
Having Mashiro still be the lead after being raped/captured gives us much more emotion. It allows us to see a new aspect of her character. How does she deal with this? Like, it’s a bad thing in hentai where rape is just a thing that is either completely glossed over and the characters just move on like nothing happened, or the victim is just immediately a mind-broken slave. There isn’t much dealing with how victims of trauma deal with trauma. Even Beserk, the story that people say uses rape the best for Guys’ motivation, still just made Casca completely nonexistent as a character for 20+ years and failed to develop her. You could have told the story of a survivor going through the difficult process of overcoming what happened. We could see that process, instead of what I fear will happen: that we skip straight to the end.
And you can have the “I sense win is alive” as this thing in the background. She’s sending out secret messages. There’s signs that maybe win is… but no win isn’t. People start to doubt Mashiro. Maybe she’s gone a little crazy. Maybe she can’t deal with the “fact” that win is dead. Maybe it’s better if someone else took over the group. Etc etc.
God damn, I know that there’s the “I made this up so I like it better” fallacy but doesn’t that sound more interesting than everything win has done thus far?
I really think switching away from Mashiro was a mistake. Even if the end result of the OG series was she gets captured, you could have still followed her post-capture.
It also doesn’t help that win as a human acts nothing like win as a mecha. Complete character assassination there. Like, you could have had the “crusty old veteran” aspect of her in the body of a girl as a purposeful clash between looks and being. Instead they just cut that aspect out entirely.
Sigh.
Edit: one more idea… which will likely happened eventually anyway. Part of Mashiro’s journey can be reuniting with dark Mashiro.
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