Oh snap, she has a last name?  Yay trivia!

I rarely forget about Mari, but that's because she fits into Tsuwabuki's arc in a way that seems very natural and important to me.  She is to Tsuwabuki what Tatsuya is to Wakaba, basically -- devices to draw out the main-er character, and almost backup Black Rose duelists themselves.  Unless I'm misreading Mari, she has a crush on Tsuwabuki (that he's completely oblivious to), which is why she badmouths Nanami to him and ends up talking with him about relationships and adulthood.  Which in turn influences what he does and how we see him.  Tsuwabuki's episode would be a lot poorer without Mari.

If I had to guess, though, she was designed to matter for one episode and then get tossed to the side.  SKU is a show about adolescence, and elementary schoolers sit uncomfortably there.  So do adults like Mrs. Ohtori, whose role is about the same size as Mari's.  So do people like Tatsuya who lack the will to power.  As you said, Yamada and Tanaka and Suzuki (and for that matter Aiko and Yuuko) are easy to forget about too, even though they appear in multiple episodes, because they lack development.  I know a lot less about Yamada than I do about Mari.  And of course there's the man in the tan jacket with the deerskin suitcase.  Some people don't remember him at all.  Actually, I'm not sure he even exists.

A large part about how I think about a work isn't going back through it again, but rather reading more experienced peoples analyses, and then if I come up with my own ideas after that, I go find the specific parts I'm thinking of. For this reason, the parts I read about again get solidified in my memory of the show - if there's a character, plot point, location, event, etc. that nobody talks about, I'm extremely likely to forget all about them/it. Is this merely just a personal observation, or does anybody else feel this way about fiction?

I'm the same way about fiction, in some ways.  Mostly not SKU, because the show has had such a large and continuing influence on my life, but if you asked me to summarize even my favorite works of fiction... let's say, The Golden Compass... that I haven't read for a while and haven't talked about with anyone, the best I could do would be to give you an okay synopsis.  I'm certain there are important scenes and maybe even important characters that I've forgotten about completely.  If I talked about that book regularly, or read other people's discussion of it, I'd have a better memory not only of the skeleton of its plot, but the details, the viscera.  I'm not sure whether that's just because talking and reading about a work keeps it fresh, or whether there's something intrinsic about interacting socially around a work that fixes it in memory.

Tangent.  Shakespeare's most famous sonnet ("Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day?") ends, "So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee."  A lot of his sonnets touch on that idea: an enduring work of literature makes its subject immortal.  But no one knows the name of the person Shakespeare was writing about.  We only remember he existed (we are pretty sure it was a he) because he was related to someone more important.  And most of us don't even really remember the sonnet, though we might remember talking about it in English class.  Memory can be so contextual.  Can you really say that the sonnet still gives life to its subject?  And yet, if we forget it, isn't there a sense in which the subject really is gone for good?  What is eternity?

Last edited by satyreyes (02-07-2015 09:05:43 AM)

Riri-kins wrote:

I liked Mari. I imagined she wouldn't be scared of Nanami if she ever met her. My personal canon about her was that she was Shiori's favored little sister.

I always thought they were cousin since they looks similar but don't have the same last name.

Anyway, I really likes Mari and that's really sad she only appear in one episode. I would paid to see an episode where her and Nanami interact. That would be entertaining.