Saikyou Onmyouji no Isekai Tenseiki: Geboku no Youkaidomo ni Kurabete Monster ga Yowai Sugirundaga - Vol. 9 Ch. 38

[yoghurt4c]

why the long faces

 

[dbzclamp]

Y'know, if you let the hero actually do some fighting here she might start unlocking some of her power.

 

[Seroster]

There is a Japanese philosophy that goes something like "Never do anything half heartedly." "You can't take back the stroke of a brush. Properly think about what you do, and follow through to the end. Don't start something if you aren't prepared to finish it. This way, you will never regret your actions."

The extremist view of this is "If you can't do everything forever, then never do anything, ever."

This is similar to the MC's first argument that he is capable of doing anything. But since he can't do everything all at once all the time, then he shouldn't do anything.

To me, this is just sophistry against altruism and any form of welfare.
You don't need to dedicate yourself to creating world peace, to stop someone from bullying.
Nor do you need the resolve to end world hunger, to justify feeding a homeless person.

Several years ago, on my little gaming group's Discord, I brought up how confused I was at the tendency for many WN/LN/Manga protagonists (far from all of them, but also far more than a few) to seemingly go out of their way to NOT save people and/or use their powers for... "the greater good" you could say (& often tried rather hard to stay completely incognito if they could get away with it), given that this seems rather different from how I would expect characters to behave in a work more intended for English audiences (& maybe European/Western stories in general? Not sure.)

Someone responded w/ an explanation that attributed this trend to the different cultural connotations for such things in the Asiatic sphere of culture. Essentially, doing something once is akin to accepting responsibility for it indefinitely. The anecdote they had about a friend who lived in/was from Asia (I think it was either China or Japan, but the memory is vague) & had a light out in the indoor staircase for their apartment building there; it was inconvenient to everyone, & TBH, somewhat dangerous... but every single person it impacted refused to be the one to change it, bc if they changed it that first time, they would be expected to do so every time it went out in the future. "They would be Socially Responsible for it" might be a term to describe the situation?

I think one of the things MC's likely to've already put thought to, but the girls have not, is that if he's KNOWN for saving the whole city from this seemingly catastrophic stampede, there's likely to be a cascading series of issues that will occur as a result of the public knowing. The first is the one is given the most precedence in the story: as he has repeatedly said, it's likely that more than a few people would be afraid of his tremendous power; the second is that if he's visibly responsible for saving the whole town, it's very likely that whatever political and/or military powers have influence over the area will try to rope him into being "socially responsible" for doing it indefinitely by roping him into the government/army in question. It's possible their can simply cut bait & run after having saved the town, but it'll just be adding on to the list of the # of large-scale groups aware of him that think he's either dangerous or want to rope him into protecting them.

Anyway, it may not be a 1:1 comparison, given the scales involved (in terms of lives/property destruction), but this was a part of the story in a pretty lengthy list of Japanese media I've consumed that I found rather confusing, so I figured I'd bring it up in this thread, where it seemed pretty relevant.

 

[welcome2atlantis]

If Mizuchi knows you call it "something like that" it will sulk again.