Haven't encountered Love Mode, but I'm certainly reminded of the arc in Saiunkoku Monogatari about how hazing is good because meekly surviving it shows strength of character and ultimately causes people to respect you. Yah-huh.
Cf. Twelve Kingdoms' anime-only subplot of the bullied loner Sugimoto, who readily accepts the students' presence in a new strange world and rallies to the false destiny presented to her by Kou; on reflection, I think that may've been intended to make her *less* palatable to the Japanese audience (like Asuka's brashness in NGE), since Youko clearly remains the protagonist despite mostly crawling around and being bucketed.
("Bucketed": a shorthand description that evolved between the wombat-consort and me to describe stories that are devoted to making the main character suffer repeatedly, for long periods of time and in loving detail. I can't remember whether it initially referred to Stephen King's Carrie having a bucket of pigs' blood dumped on her at the prom, or to a generic scenario of dragging the protags around to be repeatedly plunged head-first into increasingly larger and more revolting buckets of filth, giving them just enough time to painfully crawl out of the first one before being introduced to the next.)
In the original 12K book, Sugimoto barely exists, which makes the entire story pretty much Anozzer Bucket For Mamselle.
It's probably all about the gaman (http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/11/11/DDGAPMADJ81.DTL&type=art). (Didn't actually see this exhbition while it was in town, though did get to go through the catalog in a bookstore somewhere.)
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branchandroot
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Date: 2007-05-01 08:16 pm (UTC)Cf. Twelve Kingdoms' anime-only subplot of the bullied loner Sugimoto, who readily accepts the students' presence in a new strange world and rallies to the false destiny presented to her by Kou; on reflection, I think that may've been intended to make her *less* palatable to the Japanese audience (like Asuka's brashness in NGE), since Youko clearly remains the protagonist despite mostly crawling around and being bucketed.
("Bucketed": a shorthand description that evolved between the wombat-consort and me to describe stories that are devoted to making the main character suffer repeatedly, for long periods of time and in loving detail. I can't remember whether it initially referred to Stephen King's Carrie having a bucket of pigs' blood dumped on her at the prom, or to a generic scenario of dragging the protags around to be repeatedly plunged head-first into increasingly larger and more revolting buckets of filth, giving them just enough time to painfully crawl out of the first one before being introduced to the next.)
In the original 12K book, Sugimoto barely exists, which makes the entire story pretty much Anozzer Bucket For Mamselle.
It's probably all about the gaman (http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/11/11/DDGAPMADJ81.DTL&type=art). (Didn't actually see this exhbition while it was in town, though did get to go through the catalog in a bookstore somewhere.)