Dex-chan lover
- Joined
- Dec 25, 2019
- Messages
- 2,088
Not a fan of this 'resolution'
It's too cheap/easy and it's basically the non-combat version of every action series' "our fight is a battle of willpowers so the person with the most conviction/resolve/will is going to be the winner in the physical fight and the other person then immediately admits defeat, acts as if their whole worldview is invalidated, and slinks off as if that's enough and their actions have been appropriately answered."
like seriously, Yuuki just spouts a bunch of "I won't give up, I'll protect her and find a way through this no matter what!" cliches and then Kotori tells her dad she won't back down and let this happen and he just... stops and leaves.
What should've happened after the punch and the dad's threats is the "look at the monster you've become." speech. Point out the horror of him turning his hand on his daughter for selfish, misdirected, and ultimately trivial reasons. Point out the hypocrisy of him defending the fact that he's abusing his child (which he explicitly admits to in this chapter so he presumably knows what he's doing and isn't cradling it in euphemisms like "disciplining" or "protecting" or anything of the sort) by threatening to destroy the life of someone standing up for a person they care about. Have Kotori spill her heart out at him about how she was just trying to get him to smile/be happy after her mom died and that his whole victim-blaming act is total BS. And then have this all be a giant stall so that the police arrive and can arrest him since they will enter to find an angry, raging dad facing off with a daughter who is obviously injured while Yuuki stands in front, protecting her.
But instead of him facing real consequences for his actions the spoiler stuff makes it seem like we're going for standard trite cliche manga storytelling which is:
It's too cheap/easy and it's basically the non-combat version of every action series' "our fight is a battle of willpowers so the person with the most conviction/resolve/will is going to be the winner in the physical fight and the other person then immediately admits defeat, acts as if their whole worldview is invalidated, and slinks off as if that's enough and their actions have been appropriately answered."
like seriously, Yuuki just spouts a bunch of "I won't give up, I'll protect her and find a way through this no matter what!" cliches and then Kotori tells her dad she won't back down and let this happen and he just... stops and leaves.
What should've happened after the punch and the dad's threats is the "look at the monster you've become." speech. Point out the horror of him turning his hand on his daughter for selfish, misdirected, and ultimately trivial reasons. Point out the hypocrisy of him defending the fact that he's abusing his child (which he explicitly admits to in this chapter so he presumably knows what he's doing and isn't cradling it in euphemisms like "disciplining" or "protecting" or anything of the sort) by threatening to destroy the life of someone standing up for a person they care about. Have Kotori spill her heart out at him about how she was just trying to get him to smile/be happy after her mom died and that his whole victim-blaming act is total BS. And then have this all be a giant stall so that the police arrive and can arrest him since they will enter to find an angry, raging dad facing off with a daughter who is obviously injured while Yuuki stands in front, protecting her.
But instead of him facing real consequences for his actions the spoiler stuff makes it seem like we're going for standard trite cliche manga storytelling which is:
He loses the "battle of wills" I described above, walks out defeated, karmically gets into another fight that lands him in trouble so that he's punished without having to raise the spectre of the stigma of domestic violence on Kotori (because the most important thing is that we have to preserve her pure virginal, unspoiled aura by not allowing people to know that her dad was a scumbag who hit her for selfish reasons), and ultimately leads to completely unearned reptentance and likely ultiamtely forgiveness from Yuuki and Kotori because that's the Japanese thing to do even if it's emotionally/morally unsatisfying.
and don't get me wrong, I'm also against going so far in the opposite direction where people suggested Yuuki beats the hell out of the dad or he gets killed/commits suicide as the karmic payback. I think that's excessive for a story that is still supposed to have threads of positivity/upbeat attitude that it has to go back to after this mini-arc. But I detest the whole combination of "the stronger will wins" and "defeat means friendship/forgiveness" that happens way too often.
seriously, take this story and swap Yuuki for Goku, the dad for Vegeta, and basically any other character for Kotori and replace the physical fights with Yuki's defiant words of not giving up and you've got the opening arc of DBZ.
and don't get me wrong, I'm also against going so far in the opposite direction where people suggested Yuuki beats the hell out of the dad or he gets killed/commits suicide as the karmic payback. I think that's excessive for a story that is still supposed to have threads of positivity/upbeat attitude that it has to go back to after this mini-arc. But I detest the whole combination of "the stronger will wins" and "defeat means friendship/forgiveness" that happens way too often.
seriously, take this story and swap Yuuki for Goku, the dad for Vegeta, and basically any other character for Kotori and replace the physical fights with Yuki's defiant words of not giving up and you've got the opening arc of DBZ.
