Hiraku wrote:

One thing I feel that we do need to watch out for is us creating the "good guy/bad guy" dichotomy that we tend to make when we read a story.

I remembered reading someone's post about Murakami (or someone else) expressing his thoughts on the Aum sarin gas attack, a lot of things turned into the "us vs. them" mentality.

This!  The story wants to make it clear how dangerous "they" are.  Not "they" as a group of people, but "they" as a concept that divides us.  Rich vs poor,  revolutionary vs establishment, red vs blue, us vs them.  They are different.  They don't think like we do.  They are to blame.  It is alright to threat them poorly, they're not like us.

Sanetoshi was consumed by these divisions and grew to hate the world that he no longer felt a part of.  Kanba was his true protege and perhaps the purest form of this dissociation.  There was no grand moral message behind his destruction, just a simple division between his family and the rest of the world.  He cared about one and if the other had to burn to save it, then so be it.

You can blame it on class, economics, politics, religion, but for whatever reason, it's the dissociation itself that is dangerous.  The loss of brotherhood and empathy with other people and with the world as a whole.  It allows us to dehumanize one another, to convince ourselves that we are so morally superior that it is alright to treat others poorly.  We see it in Al-Qaeda and other religious extremists, who think it's okay to ignore their own religious teachings of peace and compassion, as long as you're only hurting them.  We see it in a debate audience cheering the idea of people dying without insurance.  They probably did something to deserve it, after all.  We see a child in China dying in the street.  No one wants to take the risk of sticking their neck out for one of them.  We see it all around us.  How many people do we pass every day but never really see?  Nothing but white and gray cutouts.  Do we think of them as real people, or just part of the scenery?  Apathy is evil for beginners.  It lets acts of kindness go undone, it avoids creating those critical connections that bind us together, it drives us apart from the them that is the rest of the world and seals us in a little box of our own creation.

Momoka gets it.  Everyone deserves compassion.  Every child deserves to feel loved.  The daughter of the crazed artist.  The boy who destroyed his own hands.  Even the children of terrorists.

Notebook Darling wrote:

The Second Penguin wrote:

1. What do the rabbit twins do? They tell pink-haired ghost/curse Sanetoshi how smart he is. The self-praise is a good show of his vanity and cockiness. However...

DFKSDJFSDF - So is that why Princess of the Crystal / Hat!Himari is telling the boys they don't amount to anything.
The hats are the opposites of the rabbits.

Self-praise risks stagnation. Telling the boys that they are shit would motivate them to keep looking for the Penguindrum.

For the longest time, when Sanetoshi was around to tell them, "Ehhhh... the medicine will cure your sister." Kanba and Shouma (especially Kanba) gave up on looking for Penguindrum because they thought they've found an easier solution to save their sister, and told the princess that they don't need her anymore.

But in the end, it turned out to be a cruel joke. They should've followed through instead of wasting precious times relying on the easy way out of their problems.

In spite of the princess giving them crap, when Kanba needed a real answer from her on whether or not he can save Himari, you know that her words can be trusted.

Last edited by Hiraku (12-24-2011 11:44:22 AM)

Haha, I wasn't the only one drawing parallels between Sanetoshi and SKU. I actually first compared him to Mikage in my mind, but that was partially because Momoka struck me as having a lot of parallels to Utena. A pink-haired girl is meant to change the world(according to Yuri and Keiju) but instead ended up changing the lives of only a few individual people, and to do that she had to leave this world. Sanetoshi is fascinated by Momoka because, as he says, she's just like him but has rejected him. He is a scientific type whose original goal was to save people, but instead thought that destruction would better serve his ends. He was a doctor, after all, which leads me to believe that he originally had good intentions. I'm not a big enough tool to suggest that these are at all the same character, but I as definitely struck by the parallels.

Sanetoshi's hubris is something that makes a lot of sense to me. It reminds me of a lot of people who shoot a lot of people in an effort to call attention to themselves or be remembered. Some may say they did it to draw attention to their particular cause, but that's such a weak excuse. You could slog away for whatever your cause is day in and day out and do much more for it, but no one would give a shit. You could heal hundreds of people, teach thousands, and never get even close to the amount of recognition as some asshole who blew up a building.

I want to start quoting Marilyn Manson's album from around the time the Columbine Shootings happened and what they say about the nature of celebrity and public death as spectacle, but I won't.

It's people's fear of dying unremembered that drives it, and you can "do" a lot more if you're destroying rather than creating. It takes countless hours, money, people, and time to feed, clothe, care for, and educate one person--and one man with a bullet destroys all of it. Sanetoshi started out wanting to do something to be remembered, and first that led him to becoming a doctor and a researcher. But like anything else, it's just your job. Nothing can match up the image of a mythic revolutionary leader. And he assumes there's always going to be someone who wants to be remembered more than they want to help people--like him. People that will do literally anything to escape being turned into nothing.

I'm glad someone already pointed out that cult members and similar organizations are definitely built up of intelligent, often thoughtful people who were caught off-guard at a vulnerable moment. Cults tend to pick up people who need some sort of sense of community, whether they've just moved to a new town or always felt like an outsider. And giving that person love and acceptance, your fruit of fate, is what it really takes to bring them back. We can see this really well with Al Quaeda, who tend to take the unaccepted and disaffected and promise them brotherhood--they're often seen in many Muslim countries sort of the way we consider gangs and gang activity. And the most effective interrogation method to these men who have been hardened by their own supposed brethren, and led to expect the worst of tortures? Talking to them. Asking about their kids, showing them pictures of your kids. Talking about soccer, about food, about anything. You make them realize that we're basically just people, not the monsters they've been led to believe. That's the only reason we ever do something so awful to people--because we've justified in our minds that they're not people.

Frau Eva wrote:

Haha, I wasn't the only one drawing parallels between Sanetoshi and SKU. I actually first compared him to Mikage in my mind, but that was partially because Momoka struck me as having a lot of parallels to Utena. A pink-haired girl is meant to change the world(according to Yuri and Keiju) but instead ended up changing the lives of only a few individual people, and to do that she had to leave this world. Sanetoshi is fascinated by Momoka because, as he says, she's just like him but has rejected him. He is a scientific type whose original goal was to save people, but instead thought that destruction would better serve his ends. He was a doctor, after all, which leads me to believe that he originally had good intentions. I'm not a big enough tool to suggest that these are at all the same character, but I as definitely struck by the parallels.

Sanetoshi's hubris is something that makes a lot of sense to me. It reminds me of a lot of people who shoot a lot of people in an effort to call attention to themselves or be remembered. Some may say they did it to draw attention to their particular cause, but that's such a weak excuse. You could slog away for whatever your cause is day in and day out and do much more for it, but no one would give a shit. You could heal hundreds of people, teach thousands, and never get even close to the amount of recognition as some asshole who blew up a building.

I want to start quoting Marilyn Manson's album from around the time the Columbine Shootings happened and what they say about the nature of celebrity and public death as spectacle, but I won't.

It's people's fear of dying unremembered that drives it, and you can "do" a lot more if you're destroying rather than creating. It takes countless hours, money, people, and time to feed, clothe, care for, and educate one person--and one man with a bullet destroys all of it. Sanetoshi started out wanting to do something to be remembered, and first that led him to becoming a doctor and a researcher. But like anything else, it's just your job. Nothing can match up the image of a mythic revolutionary leader. And he assumes there's always going to be someone who wants to be remembered more than they want to help people--like him. People that will do literally anything to escape being turned into nothing.

I'm glad someone already pointed out that cult members and similar organizations are definitely built up of intelligent, often thoughtful people who were caught off-guard at a vulnerable moment. Cults tend to pick up people who need some sort of sense of community, whether they've just moved to a new town or always felt like an outsider. And giving that person love and acceptance, your fruit of fate, is what it really takes to bring them back. We can see this really well with Al Quaeda, who tend to take the unaccepted and disaffected and promise them brotherhood--they're often seen in many Muslim countries sort of the way we consider gangs and gang activity. And the most effective interrogation method to these men who have been hardened by their own supposed brethren, and led to expect the worst of tortures? Talking to them. Asking about their kids, showing them pictures of your kids. Talking about soccer, about food, about anything. You make them realize that we're basically just people, not the monsters they've been led to believe. That's the only reason we ever do something so awful to people--because we've justified in our minds that they're not people.

I thank you for have posted this comment, especially the LAST PART.

IT DOES.

So what you need is a hat and a bunny. That way you turn out rather normal.

Maybe Sanetoshi wanted the hat for himself because he was tired of being praised all the time and thought a little verbal abuse would be kinky new fun.

Oh, this thread is quite old. However...

During the ending credits of episode 23, the rabbit twins are pushing terrorists around on a subway map with long sticks like they're pawns in a game. Pink-haired Sanetoshi is giving his speech about how people have to break out of their boxes, smash corrupt society, and watch the world burn. But the rabbit twins -- his "true form" -- are talking about how they're  going to make a fuss because they were ignored by society/stuffed in the child broiler.

Interesting , I just remember how in episode 20's dialogue scene, the twin bunnies are fighting. When Sanetoshi says: "Your love won't come into fruition" they are crying that they don't want to hear it. Them Souya is trying to kiss Shirase, but he refuses. If the twins represent Sanetoshi's true feeling, is he having an internal struggle?

Deleted: "Kisses are perishable."

Isn't it electrifying?...

Note: Google Chrome identifies freeimagehosting dot com, which was used to host the image here, as a malware distributor.  Until such time as that website resolves its issues, images using that host will be removed on sight. --satyreyes

Last edited by satyreyes (12-18-2012 10:28:31 AM)