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Old 2010-05-13, 15:33   Link #81
Vexx
Obey the Darkly Cute ...
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Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: On the whole, I'd rather be in Kyoto ...
Age: 66
Quote:
Originally Posted by stubby42 View Post
Is it just me or are anime parents pretty lousy? Ui and Yui's parents are away constantly, I'm pretty sure if it were the real world Ui and Yui would of been taken away by child services by now, in the UK atleast theres a limit on how long you can leave a minor home alone before the goverment gets involved.

Clannad suffered from a similar problem, it has always annoyed me that Kotomi lived alone in her house after her parents died in a plane crash. This is despite the fact that she had a known legal gaurdian and the death of her parents were well publicised.

This leads me to one conclusion, Anime child services really sucks at their job.

Sorry, that has nothing to do with the episode which was quite frankly a disapointment, they tried to turn a 2 page joke into a 22 minute episode and it didnt work, k-on is at its best when it doesnt stick to the source material.
A bit off-topic, but basically teens are simply held to much higher level of personal responsibility in parts of Japan - though more often when a student is accepted to a high school too far from home, they'll rent space from a relative or family friend. Parents often have to travel for their work and rely on a network of "check in on them" neighbors. But basically, the teen should rise up to it since they're basically adults anyway. In Kotomi's case, she already had the trauma of losing parents... being jerked out of her school would be completely destabilizing in a collectivist society - transfer students do not usually fare well when trying to join "new herds".

Frankly, this was the case in the UK and the USA even when I was a kid, but its like some kind of "stupid idea" switch went off in the mid-80s to coddle and retard kids and delay the onset of personal responsibility longer and longer.

That all said, from an anime viewpoint - although Lucky*Star and others have shown parents are not a derail for a series, many writers simply take what I'll call the "Peanuts" route -- parents are in some other dimension and you only hear their little trumpet noises on occasion when they actually intrude on the world-bubble of the characters.
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