Re: ToQ 20
Jul. 19th, 2014 08:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
akinoameYasuko Kobayashi, may I have a word with you?
Over the years that I've been a fan of yours, I've noticed you have a...thing. Yes, a THING for dangling a thread of hope in front of your characters and yanking it away. Like the most depressing cat toy in the universe.
Now, yes. You do this to everyone. You have your Reds, your eternally optimistic and shat-upon Reds: Tatsuya of Timeranger and his romantic woes, his counterpart Wes in Time Force with his time-doomed love triangle, Shinji of Ryuki, Ryotaro of Den-O, Takeru of Shinkenger, Eiji of OOO... In your Rider series, you like to pick on the co-leads too: Ren and Yui in Ryuki, Hana's backstory and the universe's vendetta against Momotaros in Den-O (especially the movies for Momo), Ankh's very existence and Hina's difficult choice between him and her brother in OOO...
But there's a very specific character that you love to pick on. And typically, he wears green (Kitaoka, Yuto, Goto and Date...), but you also like picking on those in orange or gold (the orange-and-gold Minako of Sailor Moon, the gold Jin of Go-Busters, the orange Akira of ToQger). And you get downright cruel with them: terminal illnesses, life-threatening injuries, being erased from time, being outright deleted altogehter, a death wish.
But this time? With Akira? I think you went too far.
Seriously, this is one of the first things that ever went right in his life, the first thing that really, honestly, and truly made him happy. Seeing his first rainbow wasn't enough to make him happy, getting a new name and finally casting off the darkness of his past wasn't enough to make him smile. But seeing a kitten, taking in something innocent and cute that he could take care of and protect and love? That did it. He needed it.
Then he had to give it up, and that may have been more heartwrenching than everything else you've done to your characters and fans before.
You've killed some of my favorite characters. You've made their lives hard. You've made them work their asses off for a bittersweet ending. And I know that Akira's death wish is treated with an Addamsian kind of black humor, but holy shit. Him giving up that cat was harsh. It was cruel.
What the fuck, Kobayashi?
Over the years that I've been a fan of yours, I've noticed you have a...thing. Yes, a THING for dangling a thread of hope in front of your characters and yanking it away. Like the most depressing cat toy in the universe.
Now, yes. You do this to everyone. You have your Reds, your eternally optimistic and shat-upon Reds: Tatsuya of Timeranger and his romantic woes, his counterpart Wes in Time Force with his time-doomed love triangle, Shinji of Ryuki, Ryotaro of Den-O, Takeru of Shinkenger, Eiji of OOO... In your Rider series, you like to pick on the co-leads too: Ren and Yui in Ryuki, Hana's backstory and the universe's vendetta against Momotaros in Den-O (especially the movies for Momo), Ankh's very existence and Hina's difficult choice between him and her brother in OOO...
But there's a very specific character that you love to pick on. And typically, he wears green (Kitaoka, Yuto, Goto and Date...), but you also like picking on those in orange or gold (the orange-and-gold Minako of Sailor Moon, the gold Jin of Go-Busters, the orange Akira of ToQger). And you get downright cruel with them: terminal illnesses, life-threatening injuries, being erased from time, being outright deleted altogehter, a death wish.
But this time? With Akira? I think you went too far.
Seriously, this is one of the first things that ever went right in his life, the first thing that really, honestly, and truly made him happy. Seeing his first rainbow wasn't enough to make him happy, getting a new name and finally casting off the darkness of his past wasn't enough to make him smile. But seeing a kitten, taking in something innocent and cute that he could take care of and protect and love? That did it. He needed it.
Then he had to give it up, and that may have been more heartwrenching than everything else you've done to your characters and fans before.
You've killed some of my favorite characters. You've made their lives hard. You've made them work their asses off for a bittersweet ending. And I know that Akira's death wish is treated with an Addamsian kind of black humor, but holy shit. Him giving up that cat was harsh. It was cruel.
What the fuck, Kobayashi?