More notes on perfect videogame
13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim! I'm up to Ogata and Ryoko's first locks, and I'm working through Miura's story.
( Notes on 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim. )Every time I go 'ah, I'm probably not going to be that into this character's storyline' I turn out to be wrong. Every time!
Side note (she says, before rambling for three hundred words): it's always interesting to see the Second World War through the eyes of Japanese characters in Japanese media.
As a European, when I think about the war, I think about the Holocaust, and naturally the participating countries fall into fairly black-and-white categories if I think of them as either 'for the Holocaust' or 'against the Holocaust'. But that's not necessarily how the countries involved saw it. After all, do countries really tend to consider themselves responsible for the actions of their allies? How aware would they have been of what was happening?
(I did not realise until just now, looking it up, that the United Kingdom gave permission for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Shit.)
As a Japanese soldier fighting in the war, Miura isn't thinking about Europe or the Holocaust at all. It's 1945, so in fact the war in Europe may already have ended. He doesn't condone or even contemplate anything that's happening in Europe; it's not relevant to him. All he knows is that he's fighting to protect his home, and, if he doesn't change the course of history, the atomic bomb will be dropped.
Of course, I was already aware that individual Axis soldiers probably weren't aware of what they'd later be seen to have been fighting for, but it's also striking to see a narrative of the war that excludes Europe, when I'm much more used to narratives of the war in Europe that exclude the rest of the world. At school in the UK, I learnt very, very little about the Pacific War; the participation of Japan and the US in the Second World War was barely touched on.
I don't really know what I'm trying to express here. It's just interesting to see the perspective of a character on a different side, in a different part of the world, and discover a completely different narrative of the war from the one I'm used to.
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rthstewart is currently hosting a three-sentence ficathon, if you'd like to poke through the current prompts or post some of your own! (Exceeding three sentences is absolutely allowed.)
