Bay 12 Games Forum

Problem is that meaning or deep emotion is usually unilaterally cruddy ones. I'd much rather spend the majority of my life drinking milk and ginger (chocolate milk and something not ginger, anyway, since ginger tastes ruddy terrible to me) than spend most of it gargling feces-draino cocktails. I got tired of the "world is mud" bullshit back when I actually was stuck in classical literature for several years straight (never again).

I'd strongly say there's a lot more room to be explored in regards to upbeat and healthy interactions between characters than most everyone gives credit, though. You don't have to have shitty people being shitty to one another in a shitty situation to impart meaning, and positive emotions can get just as gorram deep as negative ones. Slice of life can be fluffy without being vapid. High literature may tend to disagree with that, but there's a ruddy reason I don't read that well constructed drek anymore.

It probably would have been a better idea to show your friend the scene in the LN rather than the anime one, since Frumple was speaking specifically about how it was worded and stuff.

Mm. Yeah, more or less. My primary complaint, really, would be drawing direct parallels to torture. As I've noted, I've ran into outright torture in fiction significantly more than I would like to, and ZnT's prose (even the animated stuff, for that matter) does not mimic it, or particularly lean towards that. It does have shades of your average dysfunctional romance relationship (i.e. abusive as goddamn), but it doesn't nearly go that far, and is on the net (especially on the net, as the frequency is somewhat muted for much of the series) what I'd call fairly normal for the genre. If you want to see abnormal, you look to something like Domina no Do. Or probably don't.

To the more general discussion, don't mistake things -- most everything that involves a tsundere character displays characteristic abuse patterns (it's really hard to say they're actually in full out abusive relationships, though, especially in context of the shows themselves*), and anything involving that and slapstick (especially clumsily written slapstick) is going to push buttons. A lot of romcom slapstick in general does, really. Not stuff I'd recommend to an actual abuse victim. Fiction in general with romance involved is a freaking minefield when it comes to stuff like that.

*ZnT's actually a pretty good example of that, really. Insecurities, violence, and saito being a clumsily written harem protag aside, the main pair is written in context as more or less getting along pretty well as things progress (though that progression is made significantly harder by saito being said CWHP and louise's own character flaws) and the violent aspects just kinda' shrugged off. Relationship ends up being vaguely healthy, more or less, iirc. At least as tsundere-included anime romcom go.

The reality, of course, is that without mind control, a relationship like that would crash and burn like goddamn, probably incinerating significant portions of the countryside considering both the characters in question are what amounts to magical WMDs.

P... please, sir. No milking the world-destroying tentacle beast ;_;

... I'm looking at the LN right now, actually, because I could have sworn I've read the things and the discussion was ringing no bells whatsoever, and really not seeing it. Looking at the second chapter of the first volume right now, which includes the scene with the riding crop, and the word torture is used, but read like a torture scene... no. I've unfortunately read more of those than I'd like, and that bit of text doesn't even faintly resemble them. It's definitely on the more violent side of the whole tsundere nonsense, but it's also definitely just that.

Also damn, I didn't realize the anime actually toned down saito's scuzziness. Yikes. Both the times (skimmed up to the second volume now) the whip's been involved saito has come off as just a wee titch rape-y.

Third one I've ran in to actually did git a bit rough, but apparently did so little that saito was back to forcefully molesting louise <12 hours later. Then there's a volume of... nothing. Next one has a small bit that's mostly not detailed and from which saito recovers basically instantly, and in something like a hour is fighting in mortal combat with super mage zombies. Then nothing until roughly a volume later, and that not detailed and the setup for a crappy one-liner. And now I've skimmed through a third of the available material and want to read something else :V

But in the first six volumes, I've only noticed one thing that even toes the line of reading like a torture scene, and that was... not really treated seriously by the text itself. I can see how someone that's not actually ran in to the real thing could be made uncomfortable by that particular scene, though.

That'd be Breath of Fire 2, which is a jrpg with a few minor action elements. SNES game originally, actually, just had a GBA re-release.

Well, as P noted th'main problem being had on their end is they spend time on reddit.

have you considered the argument
that instead
what was said
was what was meant?