Thread: Licensed Sukitte Ii na yo
View Single Post
Old 2012-11-17, 19:45   Link #193
novalysis
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Feb 2011
I'm going to offer a perspective that might be quite potentially heretical. Through out this entire episode, I thought to myself how much more different this episode would have felt, if Sukkite Ii belonged to the harem, rather than Shoujo genre, with Yamato as the harem protagonist.

The scary thought is, from a Harem standpoint, Yamato would be one of the best protagonist ever written in that genre. Indeed, if we look at this from Yamato's point of view, we have a situation with many parallels to that of a Harem protagonist, with Mei serving as the main girl.

Looking at this episode from a Harem, as opposed to a Shojou perspective, I realized that it was harder to bear hostility against Megumi. This is especially after we get a peek into Megumi's life herself, which is a very interesting one in it's own right. Had Sukkitte Ii (The horror! Blasphemy!) been a harem instead of Shoujo, and we were seeing it from Yamato's view point, then a "Megumi" route would have made Megumi one of the more popular Secondary Characters in the harem. Quite like what we see in other Visual Novels, where there's usually a girl who is regarded on par with the Lead Girl, or even better than the Lead Girl..

It's just an observation that came to my mind when the Anime PoV switched to Yamato, and gave us peek into Megumi's life.

It's interesting that we find this objectionable in a Shoujo, but in a harem, we would either shrug, or declare Megumi a girl we would like to see a full route of. Here, we call her malicious. To be honest, I think she's not so much malicious, but lonely after that scene with her and Yamato in that small apartment.

One Genre's Heroine is another's Love Rival.

It also illustrates well, the Fridge Horror of how choosing another route might make the main girl suffer.

It's an interesting thought experiment to consider whether Sukkite would have been weaker had we seen the show from Yamato's, as opposed to Mei's viewpoint. If we see this show from Yamato's viewpoint, I have no doubt we'd be hailing this as one of the most realistic and best written "Harem/Romance" in the past few years. As it is, Sukkitte is top class Shoujo, but it's interesting that the quality of Shoujo writing is higher.

Spoiler for Genre Clarifications:
novalysis is offline   Reply With Quote