I’ve definitely been reading too much about comparative methodology recently. While having lunch, out of the blue, the thought just popped into my mind that the common thread running through the small handful of anime series that I’m watching this season involved protagonists whose moms are absent from their lives.
Given my current love affair with working from the middle of Sartori’s ladder of generality, I also found myself disaggregating the missing mom category into a finer grained taxonomy:
Mommy ga miteru:
- Evangelion 1.01: Shinji misses Yui, love-hates Gendou; but Yui is close to him in
onetwo ways. This case overlaps with the following set.
Wagaya no Oinarisama: Remember, Touru, the Fox will be with you. Always.
Oedipus Complex:
- Code Geass R2: Must defeat father to avenge mother and possess sister.
Parents KIA for the Precious:
- Kamen no Maid Guy: For the sake of Grandpa’s fortune (but with GAR meido man rather than Pretty Boy Butler) dazou!
- Nabari no Ou: For the sake of the White Devil of Miracle Gro nano!
- xxxHOLIC Kei: For the sake of the son who is oh so tasty to the hungry ghosts.
Which brings me back to Wagaya no Oinarisama. I’ve not made time to post about it regularly but the Miyako angle has really raised the series in my estimation. The antics of fox and miko in the city are fine too but the touching exploration of Miyako’s relationship with her family via Kuu and Kou have added an x-factor to a series that threatened to devolve into a mundane ‘monster of the week’ anime.
I’m sure that there’s some psycho-analytic theory-type explanation via Freud or, Haruhi help us Lacan, about the wider significance of how the aching gap left by the missing and missed mother feeds the element of fantasy that these stories are built on (au contraire, see Pan’s Labyrinth, which also happens to be the best film I’ve seen in recent years). But I’m just enjoying how this thread is enhancing the enjoyment of my animu this spring.
it is interesting how most animes feel the need to get rid of the parents somehow.
I think Nanoha is the only anime where the parents are still around and actually knows what is going on.
There is a very good reason why many anime have missing parents. Most parents in their right minds would not allow so much as 1/4 of known anime plots occur underneath their nose. “Shuffle!,” “Girls Bravo!,” “Galaxy Angel” and “School Days” are four examples (off of the top of my head) that would have been prevented *entirely* if there were more parents around.
in school days the parents are around but they are either:
Perverts (Father - Makoto is actually the girls half uncle)
or
brain dead (the mothers are half sisters, including makoto’s mother)