Sorry about the radio silence these past several days. I’ve been busy looking for the cause of Nadeshiko Syndrome… you know, the disease that unmercifully kills one out of every three anime mothers within a few years of giving birth.
So far, we’ve isolated it to the Melodrama-6 gene on the Lazy Plot Device chain. Still a long way to go… in the mean time, we’ll have to continue with experimental treatment methods.
How about the unnatural rate of widows in anime? :p :P :p
ROFLMAO. Japanese commercials ftw.
“Lazy Plot Device chain”. HAHAHA.
Y’know, I love it when I get the joke. ‘Nadeshiko Syndrome’… The Librarian and I are 10 episodes into CCS, so it’s not like I got it by MUCH in the way of time (24 hours), but I got it.
And it made me laugh. Hard.
Wonderduck > I didn’t even get it until you said it… xD
Great :D
I want to say ‘It happened in Nadesico too,’ but I don’t know if I could.
I read somewhere that, in Japanese society, a mother figure tends to be a highly stabilizing force, especially within the household. And in order to make the story more interesting, less stable, less resolved, the easiest way to deal with the mother is to kill her off.
OK, so what’s the explanation for all of the dead fathers?
OK, so what’s the explanation for all of the dead fathers?
Stomach ulcers, mostly.
Believe it or not, mortality rate for males in 40s is alarmingly high for Korea, and I suspect things to be similar in Japan. The most common reason is cancer, but recent research has shown connections between Stomach Ulcer and cancer, so what Jeff is saying is probably true.
As for removing of the mother, I know one very influential person who does did very consistantly; Adachi Mitsuru. In almost all of his manga, either one of the character’s mother is already dead, or will die of some illness during the series. It happens so often, yet in such poignant detail, that my wife and I wonder whether his mother died when he was young, or he witnessed this happening to a very close friend. The one of most memorable moment in all the manga I read was the scene where Hero and Hikari was playing catch after Hikari’s mother died in Manga series H2 by Adachi Mitsuru.