This post is a quickie, as it’s more about getting feedback than positing some position and buttressing it with evidence. I don’t have that evidence, see, and you lot may be able to help me more than conventional research. Not to worry, it’s not about something arcane; it’s about Tokyo Magnitude 8.0, which every fan and his/her (righteous) mother seems to be watching right now.
Mari Kusakabe has a few levels in awesome; she makes that much clear to us early on. She’s also a single mom, which is fine by me, as I think single mom heroines can have depth that your average action lady tends to lack. She has a daughter at home, and the titular earthquake happens to coincide with said daughter’s birthday, and she grapples the ordeal with a magnificent poker face, adding to the dramatic tension in a nice way. We know that her daughter could be dead, or that Mari could (hell, probably will…if she doesn’t, she’ll trump Kamina threefold as far as I’m concerned) suffer a breakdown at some point, and neither is an especially pleasant prospect.
We also learn, in episode three, that Mari is a widow. Now, it’s not certain that her husband was the father of her child; we can only assume as much from the dialogue. Nor is it certain that Mari didn’t do her fair share of gallivanting before her marriage. The point is that Mari presumably didn’t come across her child accidentally, and she isn’t a single mom due to divorce. Her situation seems to be the outcome of the most “correct” sequence of events, according to a conservative/traditional morality. I wonder, then, if she’d be such a heroine if it were otherwise — how many single mom heroines in anime and manga entered into single momhood in “questionable” ways?
The adoption/de facto adoption/non-literal parent-child relationship route seems to come into play with some frequency. I haven’t seen Seirei no Moribito, but isn’t that the case there? The protagonist of 20th Century Boys (which I just started, so go easy on the spoilers plzkthx) is, as of chapter four, a kind of righteous dad insofar as he acquired the child under his care without even the use of sex (it’s his niece). Then we’ve got widows like Mari; a recent example that comes to mind is Soyon from Kemono no Souja Erin (though I didn’t get far in that, either), and there’s…er, [classified information] from Clannad, of course. But are less “respectable” single parents often relegated to Minor Character Land? My main problem is that I can’t think of many at all. And is my perception somehow off-target to begin with?
Help me out here, O wise internets. Share your experience so that the gaps in my experience might be rendered irrelevant.
Pontifus
kaiserpingvin
cuchlann
Shance
TheKittymeister
r042
ghostlightning
/ 29 July 2009I may just be afflicted with the stupids right now, but I don’t know what exactly you’re asking?
Pontifus
/ 29 July 2009More likely I’m afflicted with the really tireds and worded the thing only semi-coherently. In a nutshell: Mari’s a single mom because her husband/the father of her child died. Where are the single mom characters who got their kids by sleeping around? The ones who, by the standards of certain elements of society, might be considered more “immoral” than widows and adoptive parents? I don’t see them very often. Are they brushed past as minor characters when they show up at all? Is there a strong/central single parent character whose kid was basically a mistake? (And, I guess, what does all that say about the consumers of the media in question, the target audience as it were, or maybe what does it say about perceptions of the target audience, but I’m interested in the other stuff first and foremost.)
ghostlightning
/ 29 July 2009Not exactly by sleeping around, but rather by unwanted pregnancy (IIRC she considered an abortion but chose to have Ryuuji):
Yaa-chan of Toradora!
Her being such an awesome mom as well as someone to be taken care of is one of the more endearing elements of the show.
shame on you Pontifus for completely forgetting about her so soonHere’s a little more literature on her [->]Pontifus
/ 29 July 2009Oh man, good example. Toward the beginning, Yasuko seems like little more than a burden on Ryuuji, but she handily steps out of that pigeonhole later on. If there’s an “unrighteous mom” trope, which is basically what I’m trying to figure out, maybe she’s the subversion of it.
Shame on me for real; I even read your Mother’s Day post.
ghostlightning
/ 29 July 2009Kare Kano manga. Arima Souchiro’s dad left his mom to be a jazz pianist in the US. The mom was horrifically neglectful, at some point leaving him wandering in the streets. He was eventually adopted by his dad’s brother and was raised lovingly. The mother plays a minor role in the narrative, but at some point plays a dangerous, antagonistic one.
Panther
/ 30 July 2009Seirei no Moribito’s Balsa was asked to be a guardian for Chagum, thus becoming his “mother” by duty, and only for the duration of the time he was under her protection from even his own real father.
Soyon is most definitely Erin’s mother, but no one knows what happened to Erin’s father either (at least, I stalled at episode 3 and spoiled at episode 7 so beyond that, if they went into the father’s history, I would not have known). Neither are “mothers by chance”.
Pontifus
/ 30 July 2009Right; I’m looking for moms and dads who are unlike Balsa and Soyon in that regard, but who are central to the plots of their respective stories anyway (or aren’t, as I suspect most “less honorable” parents are relegated to the sidelines due to some set of social concerns).
Out of curiosity, what’s Chagum’s biological dad like? Or would that require spoiler upon spoiler to explain?
ghostlightning
/ 30 July 2009Chagum’s dad is the emperor. There are no bad guys in Seirei no Moribito. Zero, zilch, nil, nada. The conflicts are conflicts of beliefs and interests, but never for a moment driven by malice. It’s quite remarkable, really.
c160
/ 30 July 2009So you want a character who got a child from “questionable” circumstances and a main character of the series she’s in?Nana Komatsu of NANA fulfills both criteria.She got pregnant BEFORE marriage and she’s one of the main character of her series.The story is evenly(well,almost) narrated by her and the other Nana of the story,so yes she’s quite central to the plot.
Pontifus
/ 31 July 2009All the franchises mentioned are ones I want to check out at some point. Hmm…maybe it’s the case that accidental parents are usually central or important characters when they show up. A number of the adoptive/figurative parents could fall under the accidental tent as well. I’ll try to rearrange the mental board and see what happens. Thanks for your input, all; come back if you think of any others.
lelangir
/ 1 August 2009Another adoption case is in Nanoha, where [massive Nanoha spoilers]…
[end massive nanoha spoilers]
However, that motif doesn’t receive much of any treatment and is left largely ignored. From what people have said about TM8.0, Mari is there mostly to juxtapose Mirai. You compare and contrast one another. It’s not that one or the other is a “device”, but that their relationship is meant to point out the differences in each other.
Pontifus
/ 1 August 2009I’m not thinking of things in terms of “devices” so much (this time). My question is whether a character in Mari’s significant position must generally be a relatively socially acceptable kind of mother — thus, not divorced, and not having ended up with her child by sleeping around. There do seem to be some examples of less “pure” protagonistic parents, but not too many. I say all this with the caveat that I don’t know all that well what would and wouldn’t be acceptable according to conservative Japanese morality.
Thus far, I’ve been looking at adoption as “pure” parenthood — but, really, I need more evidence to say for sure. There just don’t seem to be a slew of negatively-portrayed adoptive parents in anime and manga (going with Nanoha, Lindy Harlawn is consistently amiable, if I remember correctly). Given the number of related trains of thought this has spawned, though, I’m quickly figuring out that I won’t get far without considering a range of related topics in depth.