Forgiveness in Japanese fiction

[Solarc]

I see some people making it sound as though I'm saying this is a thing in every form of Japanese media. I'm not, I can only speak based off what I've personally experienced, which I thought would have been obvious enough. Maybe I should've put an anime, manga, and games parenthesis in the title.

As for those saying it's not exclusively a Japanese thing, well, I wouldn't know. Almost everything I consume nowadays is from over there. I see people mentioning Magneto being handled in that way, so I guess it's starting to show up in media from other countries, too, interesting.

 

[Seductivpancakes]

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Came for this.

 

[DrForester]

This is now a Fruits Basket Thread. Shoujo will not be beaten!

 

[earthsucks]

it's not always the case in written fiction: e.g. most of mishima's output.

 

[samoyed]

I see people mentioning Magneto being handled in that way, so I guess it's starting to show up in media from other countries, too, interesting.

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Don't forget the Magneto thing predates anime/manga genre conventions.

 

[chrisPjelly]

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

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Yeah, tbf, I'm pretty sure this shit happens a lot in superhero comics as well. Rule of cool mixed with long running series just eventually leads to a looooot of dumb tropes

 

[OldMuffin]

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

Spoiler

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.

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I enjoyed the series, but this was the biggest wtf moment for me. I wanted to see that asshole suffer for everything he did 😡

 

[Birdie]

I like it when they make the eventual good guy a COMPLETE psychopath when we first meet him.

Like, think Buccelati. "Drugs are bad", but hardcore torture is alright.

But I'm not gonna lie, I LOVE this trope.

 

[MoonToon]

The Dragon Ball thing just seems like pragmatism.

Like sure, you don't like the guy. You're scared shitless being around the guy. They guy may have tried killing you once and though you're stronger than 99.999999% of all things on earth he could turn you into a forgotten dust ball in no time IF HE WANTED TO.

... But the ONLY guy you know who is on your side who can take him down is like "Ehhhh, he's alright! We're fightin buddies now!" and he chills the fuck out and leaves people alone. Plus you know there's a greater than good chance that your friend got the attention of someone else that's too strong for you and only they can face. So WTF you gonna do about that? Nothing, you gotta give him room and deal with it.

But yeah, this is a thing I've noticed. Could also be culture thing ... I haven't seen many eastern movies but the ones I have seen seem far more ok with having things not end on a happy note.

 

[somerandomweirdguy]

I like it when they make the eventual good guy a COMPLETE psychopath when we first meet him.

Like, think Buccelati. "Drugs are bad", but hardcore torture is alright.

But I'm not gonna lie, I LOVE this trope.

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Fucking Kakyoin.

But in my mind JoJo takes place in an alternate universe where sane human morality is a an incredibly loose guideline

 

[Terrell]

As long as it doesn't involve straight-up murder, torture or other similar issues, yeah, they tend to be forgiven.

The last anime I saw that was ripe with this was Kakegurui, but that story is framed in a way that makes it.... understandable, I guess?

 

[Dennis8K]

私たちはあなたを許します、王

 

[L Thammy]

It's also worth noting that Dragonball has repeatedly shown that this doesn't always work out. Taopaipai surrenders, but the moment he's shown mercy, he pulls out a weapon and tries a sneaky attack. Raditz begs for forgiveness, then immediately goes back to what he was doing. Freeza asks for mercy and uses it for a hopeless attack. Fat Buu actually did sort of work, but then Evil Buu showed up and caused another situation that had to be dealt with before it stuck.

Goku tries to forgive, but if it doesn't work, he doesn't mind killing the bad guy.

 

[chrisPjelly]

I like it when they make the eventual good guy a COMPLETE psychopath when we first meet him.

Like, think Buccelati. "Drugs are bad", but hardcore torture is alright.

But I'm not gonna lie, I LOVE this trope.

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Fucking Kakyoin.

But in my mind JoJo takes place in an alternate universe where sane human morality is a an incredibly loose guideline

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Kakyoin was mind controlled and Bruno only killed/hurt other gangsters. Funny af, but hardly unforgivable. What people have been talking about here would be the equivalent of forgiving Dio and Kira. In fact, Jojo is probably the most vindictive outlier of shonen that comes to mind

Spoiler

Dio and Kira get fuuuuucked up super hard lol

 

[ItWasMeantToBe19]

As long as it doesn't involve straight-up murder, torture or other similar issues, yeah, they tend to be forgiven.

The last anime I saw that was ripe with this was Kakegurui, but that story is framed in a way that makes it.... understandable, I guess?

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Naruto forgives waaaaaaaaaaaaay worse than that.

Obito killed tens of thousands, Orochimaru tortured and killed children, Pein led a totalitarian dictatorship and killed hundreds to thousands of people, Itachi tortured his child brother.

 

[HStallion]

I like how people ignore this shit happening all the time in Western fiction as well. Superhero fiction is rife with this kind of writing for example.

 

[Aaronrules380]

Naruto forgives waaaaaaaaaaaaay worse than that.

Obito killed tens of thousands, Orochimaru tortured and killed children, Pein led a totalitarian dictatorship and killed hundreds to thousands of people, Itachi tortured his child brother.

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Orochimaru is literally still stealing other people's body's during Boruto but nobody seems to care lol

 

[Forkball]

Sometimes the villain isn't just too cool to write off. Gotta make that merch cash.

LOKI CUT OUT A MAN'S EYE IN THE AVENGERS

 

[Birdie]

Giorno wasn't a gangster, he was a kid and Buccelati was ready to fuck him up.

I also like to think when Diavolo was looking for someone to bring his daughter to him he was like "oh, grab me that sick fucker who licks people" and then he was like, "wait, he has a problem with me killing my own daughter? Fucking narc".

Honestly Buccelati is awesome but the fact he was SHOCKED to learn the criminal organization he was working for dealt in drugs was laughable.

 

[SOLDIER]

I don't think anything will ever top Xenogears for this theme:

Spoiler

The main villain experimented on millions of people Umbrella-style, served people up into literal food, nearly genocided the entire planet's population and has caused indescribable suffering for all the survivors, AND manages to complete his ultimate goal in the end...

And the good guys forgive him because he was sad in the end.

XG is a fantastic game with a beautiful ending save for this one bit of absolute horseshit.

And the successors would repeat this theme of forgiving the genocidal antagonist in almost every subsequent game.

 

[chrisPjelly]

Giorno wasn't a gangster, he was a kid and Buccelati was ready to fuck him up.

I also like to think when Diavolo was looking for someone to bring his daughter to him he was like "oh, grab me that sick fucker who licks people" and then he was like, "wait, he has a problem with me killing my own daughter? Fucking narc".

Honestly Buccelati is awesome but the fact he was SHOCKED to learn the criminal organization he was working for dealt in drugs was laughable.

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Bruno had to deal with someone whacking one of their own, but aside from that... fair enough lol. Still, that's miiiiiles apart from forgiving someone who committed literal genocide and mass murder.

Edit: Oh and the perspective of Vento Aureo is also from someone wanting to be a gangster, so moral ambiguity is justified. Giorno ain't a Naruto lol

 

[Boogiepop]

The interesting thing with people bringing up Magneto is that at least the first time he really turned around for a while and was a good guy in Claremont's whole run on X-men, it actually DOES try to address his history, with him literally going on trial. Particularly fun is that IIRC part of the logic going into why he deserves a second chance was that comics shenanigans meant at one point he was regressed to a baby or whatever, meaning he was literally a new person and shouldn't be culpable for crimes before then or whatever.

That said, that kinda probably cuts to why it goes the way it does most of the time: expediency. General audiences want to see cool stuff and action and all that rather than the former bad guy making proper amends and the like, I'd assume. It's a weird thing, but honestly most of the time I do feel it flows well enough that it's only really stop and think about it. (Naruto's stuff gets... real blatant at the end, though. But Naruto just gets bad in general, so whatever.)

 

[Astral]

I don't think anything will ever top Xenogears for this theme:

Spoiler

The main villain experimented on millions of people Umbrella-style, served people up into literal food, nearly genocided the entire planet's population and has caused indescribable suffering for all the survivors, AND manages to complete his ultimate goal in the end...

And the good guys forgive him because he was sad in the end.

XG is a fantastic game with a beautiful ending save for this one bit of absolute horseshit.

And the successors would repeat this theme of forgiving the genocidal antagonist in almost every subsequent game.

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Fuck that naked piece of shit.

 

[SOLDIER]

Fuck that naked piece of shit.

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Conversely, I love how FFXIV continues to handle this.

The few redeemed villains are met with prolonged reservations from the good guys, and the really really bad guys are expressly handled as "Oh no, fuck that person, you kill them on sight."

 

[squall23]

It's one of the cornerstones of Super Robot Wars. Meet hidden requirements and recruit certain villains.

 

[Mario Bilo]

As a teacher in a kindergarten I gotta say I much rather kids tell me about the Japanese stories that they saw where the bad guys and good guys talked and the bad guys were not bad guys anymore than telling me about how they watched the MCU movies and the good guys just fight and kill the bad guys.

 

[mbpm]

I remember being mad about Discord in MLP for this reason. That's not Japanese though.

 

[Neo C.]

The better question why is the West so obsessed with absolute good vs absolute evil?

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It's not the whole West though, the radical religious groups went to the new world hundreds of years ago for a reason.

 

[KtSlime]

Wasn't there some smart guy who lived in the west many years ago that said things like "if they repent, forgive them" and "love your enemy". Seems like good advice.

 

[samoyed]

Wasn't there some smart guy who lived in the west many years ago that said things like "if they repent, forgive them" and "love your enemy". Seems like good advice.

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Actually he lived in the Middle East.

Checkmate, Westerners.

It's not the whole West though, the radical religious groups went to the new world hundreds of years ago for a reason.

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I'd love to see the level of "vindictiveness" in fiction in cultures across continental area. I wonder if it's ever been studied?

 

[Kalentan]

Conversely, I love how FFXIV continues to handle this.

The few redeemed villains are met with prolonged reservations from the good guys, and the really really bad guys are expressly handled as "Oh no, fuck that person, you kill them on sight."

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Honestly struggling to think of any villains in FF14 that have been fully redeemed.

Even SPOILERS (Stormblood patch Spoilers)

Spoiler

Gaius isn't forgiven, he's just too useful to keep around then it would be to kill him for his actions in 1.0 and ARR. And the whole, Enemy of my Enemy is my Friend.

 

[Zen]

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Perfect 1st post

 

[Vex]

Sasuke: ...YEA... SORRY.

 

[wandering]

is this a japanese thing or a shounen thing? I feel like the two should be distinguished.

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This is absolutely a shounen thing. Most of the properties with a hold in the West are aimed at kids. When you look at seinen material, vindictiveness is a common theme.

 

[Deleted member 721]

Thats usual in all the world specialy in revenge stories.
Also redemption stories are very commom.
But yeah shounens love this trope and most dont work the forgiveness well and It feels weird

 

[Maso]

Bruno had to deal with someone whacking one of their own, but aside from that... fair enough lol. Still, that's miiiiiles apart from forgiving someone who committed literal genocide and mass murder.

Edit: Oh and the perspective of Vento Aureo is also from someone wanting to be a gangster, so moral ambiguity is justified. Giorno ain't a Naruto lol

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I might be remembering wrong but I thought the drug thing with Bruno / Giorno was more about how they were being peddled to kids / exploiting that demographic. Still laughably naive on Bruno's part regardless.

 

[Kain]

All these "I won't forgive you!!!" when the bad guy does something always felt off. Like, who cares if you forgive them or not lol

But it's part of the charm I guess

 

[matrix-cat]

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I seriously cannot stop watching this, it's so good.

 

[boris_feinbrand]

Forgiveness, a strange and alien concept in this place. What is it? How can it be allowed to exist?

 

[V_Arnold]

Forgiveness, a strange and alien concept in this place. What is it? How can it be allowed to exist?

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Anyone who forgives someone is immediately CANCELED!

 

[L Thammy]

All these "I won't forgive you!!!" when the bad guy does something always felt off. Like, who cares if you forgive them or not lol

But it's part of the charm I guess

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I'm pretty sure it can also interpreted as "I won't allow this".

 

[KtSlime]

許す is to allow, permit, say it's okay, etc.

This is not okay, this will not do, I will not stand for this, this cannot be, etc, all could be proper interpretations for 許されない.

 

[boris_feinbrand]

Anyone who forgives someone is immediately CANCELED!

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It's a harsh world we live in.

 

[Arebours]

Japaneses media overall is less about good vs evil and more about conflicting viewpoints. In western media even when the writers go through the effort to humanize and explain evil actions there's still a sense of inherent evil to the characters themselves. With anime, manga and so on I feel like you almost always could pivot the story around to swap the viewpoint from the "hero" to the "villain" but still end up with a sympathetic and emotionally resonant protagonist, but the same is more often than not true with western storytelling.

Then there's the part where western popular storytelling, especially Hollywood seems to be completely unable to break away from Campbells Hero's Journey template. Pretty much everything out there is cast in that mold, and I think a big reason why japanese and other asian media feels fresh and has such great appeal is because it offers a break from that stale and predictable style of storytelling.

 

[Calvarok]

if we're talking like campy genre fiction, this is pretty common in superhero comic books. usually the less popular villains become good while the more popular ones run wild forever.

im not sure i buy the "their culture isnt as much about good and evil" stuff. sounds kinda fetishistic, and obviously no one here is thinking of examples that have philosophical weight or significance to them.

i think every culture does the same dumb shit when they're selling cartoons and toys.

 

[Deleted member 32561]

I will say it's definitely true that the Western concept of good and evil isn't really something endemic to Japan. Traditional Japanese culture is more about purity vs. corruption. Someone can be corrupt and still be a person worth saving, but still need to have the corruption excised. Any truly evil beings in Japanese folklore tend to be totally inhuman- and even then it's arguable that they're more representative of "chaos" than "evil", and often simultaneously a warning sign for either individuals or society as a whole that they've done something wrong that needs addressing.

This of course changed over time, via foreign influence. There are definitely uniquely Japanese stories that feature battles of good vs. evil. But it's still something that lingered all throughout Japan's cultural history- from the folkloric Shuten-Doji that warned of imperial decadence to the modern Godzilla that warns of weaponized nuclear power (Gojira) or using nuclear power unsafely (Shin Godzilla).

I can't really speak to how this applies to such extenuating reaches that characters like Obito, Vegeta, or Sasuke are able to pull. Going from genocidal or wannabe genocidal to just being accepted as a friend or rival (as opposed to enemy) with no obvious time for growth is rather bizarre. It's something that evades me as well. I don't think it's solely exclusive to Japanese media though, I seem to recall, as Calvarok above mentions, it being common in American comic books as well. It may simply be a modern writing convenience.

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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This is an excellent post, a good comparison of the two ways of thought through modern media! :>

 

[KtSlime]

if we're talking like campy genre fiction, this is pretty common in superhero comic books. usually the less popular villains become good while the more popular ones run wild forever.

im not sure i buy the "their culture isnt as much about good and evil" stuff. sounds kinda fetishistic, and obviously no one here is thinking of examples that have philosophical weight or significance to them.

i think every culture does the same dumb shit when they're selling cartoons and toys.

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I don't disagree with the idea that cultures can be and often are romanticized or fetishized, but I also don't think every culture is the same with simply a different layer of paint. I think there is room for different cultures to have varying degrees of interpretation of what good and evil is and what it means and how to use it in media.

 

[b-dubs]

This thread makes me remember that Sword Art Online keeps trying to redeem Kayaba, who trapped thousands of people in a game (for quite literally no reason) and got thousands of them killed. He also placed a bomb in his ex-girlfriend's boob and made her take care of his comatose body while he played the game and watched all those people die (knowing full well he could save them all if he so chose).

The show then constantly tries to paint him as a heroic figure, someone who has not done anything wrong and who should be looked up to. I half expect him to turn up alive in the next season so they can fully "redeem" him without him actually ever having to acknowledge anything he's done wrong.

 

[SugarNoodles]

The omnipresent "I'll never forgive you" localization drives me bananas.

Like, forgiveness was never on the table in most of these situations. Villain has been doing terrible things all game and the protagonist hates the villain and then villain does something vile and protagonist says "I'll never forgive you"


Like, I realize it has more weight culturally in Japan but it really doesn't translate well.

 

[Kain-Nosgoth]

The omnipresent "I'll never forgive you" localization drives me bananas.

Like, forgiveness was never on the table in most of these situations. Villain has been doing terrible things all game and the protagonist hates the villain and then villain does something vile and protagonist says "I'll never forgive you"


Like, I realize it has more weight culturally in Japan but it really doesn't translate well.

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uh... didn't knew it was something you don't say in english... i've seen it a lot in french and not from japanese media