I agree with you in that I think Urasawa does his best to show the complicity of Dr. Roosevelt and the President of Thracia in the war, and how brutal the non-Persian side was, as well as Sahad and Abullah not representing all the Persians, which is why I didn't throw the book at a wall. My problem, though, is that even though Urasawa's individual work is more nuanced than most, by the end of the day, he's still created a work in which the two main Middle Eastern characters are out to either destroy the world or destroy protagonists that we like (the world's greatest robots), and they are inspired to do so by the war wreaked on them.
By itself, Pluto might annoy me but not to the same extent. The problem is that almost every single narrative I have seen not originating from the Middle East that has Middle Eastern male characters almost always has those characters as terrorists, people out to cause violence to the West, and people whose hate may be understandable but still ultimately leads them to mass destruction. I say male because Middle Eastern female characters usually get the "must be liberated from the veil" narrative instead. As such, Pluto adds to all these works and it's yet another chance where we could have had non-killing Middle Eastern characters and yet again didn't.
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Sat, Nov. 20th, 2010 01:04 am (UTC)I agree with you in that I think Urasawa does his best to show the complicity of Dr. Roosevelt and the President of Thracia in the war, and how brutal the non-Persian side was, as well as Sahad and Abullah not representing all the Persians, which is why I didn't throw the book at a wall. My problem, though, is that even though Urasawa's individual work is more nuanced than most, by the end of the day, he's still created a work in which the two main Middle Eastern characters are out to either destroy the world or destroy protagonists that we like (the world's greatest robots), and they are inspired to do so by the war wreaked on them.
By itself, Pluto might annoy me but not to the same extent. The problem is that almost every single narrative I have seen not originating from the Middle East that has Middle Eastern male characters almost always has those characters as terrorists, people out to cause violence to the West, and people whose hate may be understandable but still ultimately leads them to mass destruction. I say male because Middle Eastern female characters usually get the "must be liberated from the veil" narrative instead. As such, Pluto adds to all these works and it's yet another chance where we could have had non-killing Middle Eastern characters and yet again didn't.