Roving Thoughts archives

What School Rumble taught me about my tastes in anime

One of the things I've found is that I learn more about my tastes from the anime that I strongly dislike than from the anime that I like. It can be hard to figure out why I like something, whereas with stuff that I dislike there's often something in specific that I can point at and say 'that, I can't stand it'.

Which brings me to School Rumble, a well regarded 2004 comedy series, which I watched two episodes of once upon a time. The first episode was cute and decently funny (and had an Initial D parody that I found hysterical). Then I watched the second episode and bounced off it very, very hard because it was full of the lead characters humiliating themselves in various ways.

What School Rumble taught me is that I can't stand this. Not only do I not find it funny to see decent people doing embarrassing things and humiliating themselves, it's an active turnoff. It makes me cringe in sympathy for them and just no. I don't watch anything to cringe like that. Somewhere there is a dividing line between poking gentle fun at people and humiliating them and the second episode of School Rumble was well over it for me.

(I'm not even really interested in seeing characters that I dislike get humiliated.)

There are probably some situations where this sort of humour can work for me (I'm pretty sure I've seen and enjoyed classic black and white era film comedies in which this was a part). But as presented in School Rumble or other typical anime shows it doesn't work at all. Very few things will get me to turn off a show faster than the show asking me to laugh at someone because they are doing stupid, foolish things.

PS: I don't know if School Rumble continued with this sort of humour because I never watched any more of it. I doubt I could get the bad taste out of my mouth even today. Yes, I know, it's a pity, I'm probably missing out on a good show. That's how things go.

(This entry goes with what I learned from Jigoku Shoujo. Yes, this is a very slowly written entry; I've had it planned from the start of Roving Thoughts but never got to it until now.)

The necessity of queerrat biology in Shin Sekai Yori

(Major spoilers here.)

The following is probably obvious, but once you start following the dots at the end of the show it's clear that what happened with the queerrats is almost inevitable. Right now I feel like laying out why this is so.

A core ingredient in the precarious stability of Cantus humans is death feedback, which makes it so that almost no Cantus human can use Cantus on another human to any dangerous degree. In its flashbacks to history the show gave us a fair number of examples of what happened without this precaution (and then the false minashiro explained it). But death feedback presents a problem for Cantus humans as they interact with regular humans, especially after the history we were shown. Put simply, Cantus is what keeps Cantus humans safe from humans but death feedback means Cantus humans can't actually use it; regular humans are thus free to come after Cantus humans with everything from sharp rocks to firearms and kill them all.

This gave Cantus humans not very many options. They could completely wipe out regular humans, they could somehow completely isolate themselves from regular humans (and make a very big bet on that isolation lasting forever), or they could somehow make it possible to safely use Cantus on regular humans without invoking death feedback. The latter is what they did: they made regular humans non-human enough that they would not trigger death feedback (or at least that they would not usually trigger death feedback; as we saw during the show, killing queerrats can still trigger it under some circumstances). Cantus humans still needed to keep an eye on queerrats, especially initially; as Squealer showed, Cantus is not guaranteed protection in many ways.

(I suppose they could also somehow make it so that regular humans couldn't attack Cantus humans, but I don't think that that's a reliable protection. Note that death feedback itself is not reliable, cf fiends.)

I don't think that the Cantus humans initially warped humans into queerrats to have slaves. I think that was just a side effect of having queerrats around and keeping an eye on them.

I see the biology of queerrat queens as a measure to make it easier to control and limit queerrats. Queerrat queens are implied to be large and mostly immobile, and they are the only breeding source of queerrats. This makes it much easier to keep track of them and much easier to eliminate rogue colonies (just kill the queen and ignore everything else) and control the spread of colonies. Cantus humans were undoubtedly already very familiar with how hard it is to control the population of people who can breed freely and widely.

The morality of the queerrat rebellion in Shin Sekai Yori

It all started when @A_Libellule and I got into a Twitter discussion about this particular issue. In the course of the discussion I had a realization about my core moral position here:

If a group has to choose between living as slaves or committing genocide, picking the latter is morally legitimate.

It would certainly be nice if the queerrats (and interested Cantus humans) could find some solution short of genocide (genocide is ugly and invites counter-genocides and so on), but they are not obliged to do so and they are not obliged to remain slaves instead of committing genocide. The Cantus humans lost all moral standing to complain about it the moment that they started keeping queerrats as slaves (and, lest we forget, wiping out entire queerrat colonies when they felt like it), just as if you try to keep someone as a slave you lose the grounds to complain if they kill you to regain their freedom.

By the way all of this applies if a group is choosing between living as slaves or 'merely' killing some (significant) number of the people keeping them as slaves. I am just taking it all the way to genocide as an extreme case.

(Naturally this deeply colours my view of Squealer's rebellion and his fate and also my overall views on the Cantus humans.)

I could go on at greater length here but I suspect that this is the kind of thing where either you agree immediately or where you are not going to be convinced at all.

Note that you can make a functional argument over whether the queerrats were going to commit genocide or simply kill some number of humans and then stop. My personal view is that they were going to have to go all the way to genocide and they knew it; one surviving breeding pair of Cantus humans was potentially all that was necessary to take over the world again and destroy all queerrats, so none could really be allowed to survive.