After the fluff of the previous episode, I was quite surprised at the attempt at social commentary in this episode. It recalls the death of a baby, of heat stroke, after being left in the car while the parents played pachinko.
The portrayal of the mom was initially hugely unsympathetic, even if she was a victim of having her baby kidnapped. She’s shown to be priotising her mobile phone conversation (and not locking her car) and shopping over her child’s welfare. Her dress sense, especially the miniskirt, is probably supposed to suggest again that she prioritises her own appearance - again, at the expense of her child’s welfare. From Tokuno’s interview-interrogation, it seems that her shopping was for fashion bargains rather than household necessities. Her behaviour is so outrageous that the (supposedly) mildest person of the regular cast, Miyuki, who gives her a tight slap of great justice.
Of course, she later comes to see the error of her ways and we have a neat, tidy, happy YUA-style ending. Which is fine in the context of the YUA universe.
However, among other things, the teleological one-sidedness of the mother’s progress from irresponsibility to crisis to resolution did make me uneasy. It raises the feminist point that this kind of portrayal reinforces patriachal attitudes towards women and motherhood in Japan (e.g. where was the father?). More practically, the mother had a good point when she asked why the whole main cast was lecturing her rather than stopping the car thefts or looking her for her son. You might have thought that it would have made better sense to concentrate energy on recovering the child and apprehending the perp first and then lecturing the mom.
And I can’t help wonder if this situation was replayed in a grittier, darker universe, the mom might not change her ways for long and Miyuki would have to endure an endless persecutory Internal Affairs investigation, running in a parallel with a civil lawsuit from the mom’s lawyer from hell, for assaulting a member of the public which then leads to our heroine duo to question the values of their organization and society. But that, as I said, belongs to another setting outside the cheerful, optimistic, feel good parameters of the YUA franchise.
I had a mental bet with myself on how long I would be able to watch YUAFT. I’ve never made it through a full season previously, except the Live Action version.
The bet was that I’d lose interest on episode 6. Hah. I was optimistic. After the snake episode, which I couldn’t watch at all, a moralistic tale centering around a baby and ideal motherhood killed the series for me faster than any other season.
What happened to idiotic, meaningless chases around the city that turned out to be practical jokes and plots that revolve around about Halloween? YUAFT doesn’t really have what it takes to send a “message.” It’s like “Friends” doing an AIDS epiosde.
Shame too, because a stupid piece of fluff with lots of car chases, YUA was reasonably fun. I’ll stick with Gunsmith Cats Burst, which hasn’t lost one iota of the original’s absurdity. :-)
Cheers,
Erica
Hungry for Yuri? Have some Okazu!
http://okazu.blogspot.com
In my eyes, the only good thing in this episode was the return of the MotoComp O:
I also wondered why they wrote the story this way and found it heavily sexistic. Of course, it had to be mother. Of course, she had to shopping. Of course, she has to be a woman that seemingly cares more about her looks than anything else. Mothers who are singles are not uncommon in the Western world nowadays but it’s still questionable why they had to pick this example. It’s almost as if they want to discourage women from raising their children alone. In fact most women do not make this decision. Their boyfriends runs away or even dies or is an alcoholic, they are rarely to blame. The only real-life cases similar to this I’ve heard of either involved just the father or both parents. Really, no sensible person would blame the mother during that situation. There’s plenty of time to discuss that afterwards. After all she might get a nervous break-down (or heart attack in the worst case) which certainly wouldn’t help the situation. I’m almost afraid though the reaction of the officer who felt the need to scold her wasn’t all too unrealistic for Japan.