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Forgiveness in Japanese fiction

Solarc

Solarc

Member
Sep 24, 2018
1,159
Dominican Republic
I don't think I even realized how common this was until I saw someone else (who I believe isn't very familiar with other types of Japanese media besides JRPGs) talk about a specific case found in Radiant Historia. I don't want to talk about that one example though, just in general, why does this seem like such a common theme over there? You sometimes have the antagonist doing the most fucked up shit imaginable and the MC just forgives them one way or another. I don't think I necessarily have a problem with it (either that or maybe I'm just desensitized to it at this point) but when I saw someone else not as used to seeing that trope point it out, it was like a "hey, wait a minute..." kind of moment.
 
Mauricio_Magus

Mauricio_Magus

Member
Oct 25, 2017
12,988
Is this going to become a Dragon Ball thread?

I assume Vegeta is the most famous example of this happening. I guess it's fine because in that universe everyone can just be revived...... expect for Nappa, he just got fucked.
 
KtSlime

KtSlime

Member
Oct 25, 2017
6,910
Tokyo
In general children are taught to not hold grudges and bring up past conflict after a sincere apology has been made.
 
jaekeem

jaekeem

Member
Oct 27, 2017
3,743
is this a japanese thing or a shounen thing? I feel like the two should be distinguished.
 
Wood Man

Wood Man

Member
Oct 30, 2017
5,449
This is Goku's thing. Just about every single one of his friends were enemies at some point.
 
Dyle

Dyle

One Winged Slayer
The Fallen
Oct 25, 2017
29,881
I think it has something to do with the Japanese concepts of honor and shame, but I'm not quite sure, I'm not an expert
 
Don Fluffles

Don Fluffles

Member
Oct 28, 2017
7,052
What's worse than the forgiveness is straight up not punishing them.

If you want to rage hard at an anime, look no further than Freezing.
All I have are three words: Louis El Bridget
Main heroine Satellizer was physically and sexually abused by him as her stepbrother during childhood. A later arc has him come back, apparently a changed man... NOPE! He not only does even worse to Satellizer, but also rapes another girl who looked like her and works to brainwash the former into his slave. His girlfriend eventually stabs him and pushes him off a cliff. Before we can celebrate, however, Satellizer, in one of the dumbest scenes put on paper, jumps down and rescues him while the manga tries to give us a sob story to make him sympathetic. Inexplicably, he turns good and gets literally NO punishment.
 
Jon Carter

Jon Carter

Banned
Oct 27, 2017
5,746
The Fast and Furious producers must have replaced Chris Morgan with a Japanese writer ever since F8.
 
Riversands

Riversands

Banned
Nov 21, 2017
5,669
jaekeem said:
is this a japanese thing or a shounen thing? I feel like the two should be distinguished.
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It is asian thing to be honest. But we are taught in a similar manner to that which we are expected to forgive after a sincere apology (but whether it really works in real word or not is of course another story)
 

Deleted member 6582

Banned
Oct 25, 2017
3,789
The absolute good/evil is more of Western story trope that comes from Abrahamic religions. It's so pervasive in western culture that Western people see it as normal but lots of other forms of story telling use chaotic neutrals or characters that have different aspects to themselves but doesn't represent thier identity (ie they do bad things but they themselves aren't a manifestation of evil). Of course there's plenty of exceptions and blending.
 
chrisPjelly

chrisPjelly

Avenger
Oct 29, 2017
10,491
UltraGunner said:
This is now a Naruto thread
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samoyed

samoyed

Banned
Oct 26, 2017
15,191
The better question why is the West so obsessed with absolute good vs absolute evil?

You don't even question it, you simply assume it's the default state of things and Japan is the outlier whereas it may be that America is the outlier here.

Wrote this a while ago, probably applies here.

samoyed said:
A big difference between Princess Mononoke and LOTR is the role of society in the narratives. In Mononoke there's multiple competing societies (Ainu, Iron Town, forest denizens) with different and conflicting interests. There's corruption (figuratively) in Iron Town and corruption (literally) in the forest, and the resolution is the excising of these corrupting influences as well as the establishment of harmony between the societies.

LOTR, due to the mythopoetic nature of it, is about Good triumphing over Evil. There's also elves, but they're kind of neutral (well they weren't neutral in the films but they were non-interventionist in the books). There's individual evil and corruption, like Saruman and Denethor, but nothing like rights or society for orcs and goblins despite being ostensibly sentient. They're slaughtered without mercy, they have no motives except for conquest, no agency except to be killed by the Good Guys. Peace arrives at the defeat of evil and the return of the King (to a prior status quo of enlightened mystic kings).

The book is more complex than this but the film wasn't.
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somerandomweirdguy

somerandomweirdguy

Member
Nov 2, 2017
2,085
samoyed said:
The better question why is the West so obsessed with absolute good vs absolute evil?

You don't even question it, you simply assume it's the default state of things and Japan is the outlier whereas it may be that America is the outlier here.

Wrote this a while ago, probably applies here.
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It's not so much about absolute good vs. absolute evil as it is characters paying for their crimes. They get "forgived" and then bam it's Karma Houdini and everything bad they ever did is pretty much null.

Like, goddamn, it took until just a few months ago in the Super manga for Vegeta to ever acknowledge killing random innocent Namekians and actually showing any remorse.
 
TheSkullPrince

TheSkullPrince

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Oct 28, 2017
27,572
California
TickleMeElbow

TickleMeElbow

Member
Oct 31, 2017
2,668
I mean I think it's common in fiction for kids, kinda like how superheros (usually) don't kill.

Also in American cartoons and shit there's always that episode where it turns out the bully was misunderstood the whole time, and they become friends with the main character. Same thing basically.

Plus villains tend to be interesting, so it's cool seeing them become regulars lol.
 
samoyed

samoyed

Banned
Oct 26, 2017
15,191
somerandomweirdguy said:
It's not so much about absolute good vs. absolute evil as it is characters paying for their crimes. They get "forgived" and then bam it's Karma Houdini and everything bad they ever did is pretty much null.

Like, goddamn, it took until just a few months ago in the Super manga for Vegeta to ever acknowledge killing random innocent Namekians and actually showing any remorse.
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Yeah anime goes too far with it sometimes. People forget Vegeta was a genocidal maniac for a while.
 
Ether_Snake

Ether_Snake

Banned
Oct 29, 2017
11,306
Usually the character in question has lost something as a result of their own action, and come to understand the error of their ways. Their past becomes a burden they carry forever even after repentance, a sort of permanent sense of loss seen as a sort of sufficient punishment on its own by everyone, especially if they can proceed to then help others as a sort of self-driven penance, something seen as a difficult task to carry on, which itself can be seen as a form of punishment they must continuously accept.

Anyway I think it's pretty good. As a kid most of the cartoons I watched dealt with heavy stuff and were made by Japanese studios and I feel the lessons were pretty good compared to stuff like GI Joe or Transformer where the messages were often asbent or not really perceptible.
 
Sabretooth

Sabretooth

Member
Oct 27, 2017
5,048
India
Solarc said:
I don't think I even realized how common this was until I saw someone else (who I believe isn't very familiar with other types of Japanese media besides JRPGs) talk about a specific case found in Radiant Historia. I don't want to talk about that one example though, just in general, why does this seem like such a common theme over there? You sometimes have the antagonist doing the most fucked up shit imaginable and the MC just forgives them one way or another. I don't think I necessarily have a problem with it (either that or maybe I'm just desensitized to it at this point) but when I saw someone else not as used to seeing that trope point it out, it was like a "hey, wait a minute..." kind of moment.
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Not gonna lie as an Asian I had the opposite reaction to how vindictive characters in Western media can be.

The whole forgiveness narrative is an Asian thing, likely induced by the influence of Buddhism. Anyone doing bad shit is going to be punished in their next life anyway, so might as well forgive them in this life and look good doing so.

I remember reading the Odyssey and being shocked when it ended, like "Holy shit this entire story is just one dude killing everyone who he doesn't like? This is wild."
 
L Thammy

L Thammy

Spacenoid
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Oct 25, 2017
49,952
Dragonball's a weird case because I don't think characters are usually explicitly forgiven, they just forge temporary alliances that gradually turn into permanent ones as their relationships grow.

Like, you can mention Vegeta, but despite roughly joining the heroes on Namek, he still refers to himself as pure evil in the Cell saga, and in the Buu saga Piccolo tells him that he's not going to keep his body and train with Goku forever after he dies because he can't wash away all of his random acts of violence with a heroic sacrifice.
 
IDreamOfHime

IDreamOfHime

Member
Oct 27, 2017
14,411
Anung said:
I'LL NEVER FORGIVE YOU for making this thread.
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Man, in 2019 there has to be a more nuanced way of expressing this type of Japanese threat.
20-30 years ago when Japanese media was super niche and there were less translators, then sure. A lot of the time translations were very blunt especially with idioms that don't directly exist in the language being translated into..but it's time to find a better expression. Shouting "I'll never forgive you" after witnessing your friend/lover/parents murder is not a thing an English speaker would say and thus doesn't belong in a translated edition. It's super jarring.
 

Deleted member 19066

Banned
Oct 27, 2017
3,826
IDreamOfHime said:
Man, in 2019 there has to be a more nuanced way of expressing this type of Japanese threat.
20-30 years ago when Japanese media was super niche and there were less translators, then sure. A lot of the time translations were very blunt especially with idioms that don't directly exist in the language being translated into..but it's time to find a better expression. Shouting "I'll never forgive you" after witnessing your friend/lover/parents murder is not a thing an English speaker would say and thus doesn't belong in a translated edition. It's super jarring.
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It can't be helped.
 
DragonKeeper

DragonKeeper

Member
Nov 14, 2017
1,584
Yes, this is extremely common and has always grated on me. It's as prevalent in Japanese games as it is in anime. It's one thing to have a character work to redeem themselves but more often than not they're given a get out of jail free card no matter how many arocities they've committed, so long as they sit through the hero's Hero Speech.
 
SolVanderlyn

SolVanderlyn

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Oct 28, 2017
13,496
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Maybe it's a fantasy present in the Japanese consciousness, because punishment over here is harsh, and people are shamed more often than they are forgiven.

That's just anecdotal experience and personal conjecture, though.
 
Strangelove_77

Strangelove_77

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Oct 25, 2017
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It's not just Japanese fiction, that shit happens in the X-men movies as well. Everyone just let's Magneto go every time.
 

Deleted member 18966

Banned
Oct 27, 2017
3,043
I hate this trope because they aren't forgiving something minor, its always someone who has done something really fucked up and they face no repercusion, like Shinji on the UBW route
 

Deleted member 11413

User requested account closure
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Oct 27, 2017
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samoyed said:
The better question why is the West so obsessed with absolute good vs absolute evil?

You don't even question it, you simply assume it's the default state of things and Japan is the outlier whereas it may be that America is the outlier here.

Wrote this a while ago, probably applies here.
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Yup, pretty much this. Also you can't take shonen manga tropes (and JRPG tropes, which are heavily influenced by shonen manga) and equate that to all Japanese media.
 
Aly

Aly

Member
Oct 27, 2017
12,079
samoyed said:
To sell more Magneto stories in the future. There isn't a more sophisticated reason.
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Well yeah, but I mean that there can still be a much better way to present the characters reactions to him than they have been. This criticism is mostly for the new movies, the comics, cartoons, and even old x-men movies handled it okay.
 
Htown

Htown

Member
Oct 25, 2017
11,317
The thing is, it's actually not a theme, at least in the stories I've watched. What I mean is that the stories usually don't spend any time on the characters actually getting to a place of forgiveness. They just kind of sweep shit under the rug and act like things are cool now.
 
AnansiThePersona

AnansiThePersona

Started a revolution but the mic was unplugged
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Oct 27, 2017
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If you make your villian more cool or as cool as the heroes, this will always happen. If they are not cool, they will never be forgiven.

Persona 4's villain and a villain from Persona 5 are proof of this.
 
ItWasMeantToBe19

ItWasMeantToBe19

Banned
Oct 26, 2017
20,440
AnansiThePersona said:
If you make your villian more cool or as cool as the heroes, this will always happen. If they are not cool, they will never be forgiven.

Persona 4's villain and a villain from Persona 5 are proof of this.
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????????????????

Persona 5's villain is ludicrously uncool and impossibly lame.

Have no idea what Japanese teens see in him. Him being so popular is super weird.
 
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