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One nice thing about the anime "Karin", about a blood-making vampire: it features a complete happy family. Karin has both parents and an older brother and a younger sister and they all live together and they all love her and each other, more or less. For that matter, they all have important roles in the show.
Not that the common pattern of dead parents is unrepresented: Usui's father is missing (I forget why, maybe a runaway), Wiener's mother may be dead, and Maki's just don't show up that I can remember, but at least Karin has a full set. And no, I won't count the parents as dead simply because they're all vampires.
(Context: the observation that TV shows tend to one or both parents of a young protagonist dead or disappeared. Buffy's father was distant and eventually gone, then mom died. Roswell had a single mom and two single dads, though a couple of sets, one even seen. Dawson's Creek had a lot of breakage. Commander Sisko of DS9 was a single dad. Scrapped Princess started with dead parents. Witch Hunter Robin was an orphan. Noein had a divorced and distant dad. Card Captor Sakura's mother is dead. Tsuki-yomi had two dead mothers and a dead father. The list could go on.)
(Hikaru turned out to have a father as well as a mother but this was after three seasons and surprised us all.)
(We never meet Suzumiya Haruhi's parents. I just wondered what they could possibly be like.)
(Thinking of Sisko made me realize one practical reason for killing parents might be to cut on cast size and costs.)
Not that the common pattern of dead parents is unrepresented: Usui's father is missing (I forget why, maybe a runaway), Wiener's mother may be dead, and Maki's just don't show up that I can remember, but at least Karin has a full set. And no, I won't count the parents as dead simply because they're all vampires.
(Context: the observation that TV shows tend to one or both parents of a young protagonist dead or disappeared. Buffy's father was distant and eventually gone, then mom died. Roswell had a single mom and two single dads, though a couple of sets, one even seen. Dawson's Creek had a lot of breakage. Commander Sisko of DS9 was a single dad. Scrapped Princess started with dead parents. Witch Hunter Robin was an orphan. Noein had a divorced and distant dad. Card Captor Sakura's mother is dead. Tsuki-yomi had two dead mothers and a dead father. The list could go on.)
(Hikaru turned out to have a father as well as a mother but this was after three seasons and surprised us all.)
(We never meet Suzumiya Haruhi's parents. I just wondered what they could possibly be like.)
(Thinking of Sisko made me realize one practical reason for killing parents might be to cut on cast size and costs.)
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Date: 2007-01-28 22:58 (UTC)From:i guess the question then is how much influence there is from western culture in the anime? The missing or busy parents so you can go wandering is a fairly old theme... victorian girls tended to get to wander around when one parent was sick or there was some other family tragedy... and a lot of stories centered around orphans or families so poor that the son had to be sent out in the world. farm kids could just run off of course.
maybe anime is just in the process of catching up to the modern relaxed restrictions... still using old story-archs out of tradition.