[Aquillion]

Originally Posted by Matrim

Yes, I just watched episode 18 and its end totally ruined my suspension of disbelief. No one becomes "the leader of the financial world" if he is dumb enough to say in front of journalists that the ends justify the means and who cares if people are dying since we might gate some l33t technology. WTF? And there are people who would try to exploit virtually every dangerous situation, true, but thinking about technological advances when every few days representatives of your world fight a battle for the survival of the planet is a bit too extreme. I'd understand if a few greedy idiots tried it but the whole government? Man, they have some brave idiots in power there.

Actually, maybe it's just the X-Com fan in me, but I'm sort of predisposed to sympathize with the scientists; I think that the anime has been treating them unfairly. Their portrayal has been as cackling-robber-baron evil, which is extremely unfair.

No, seriously, think about it. Sure, we've been watching the kids all this time and feel sorry for them... but this is about a lot more than the kids. The government now knows, without question, that there is an 'alien' power in another dimension whose technology allows them to basically do whatever they want to us... and they know that this 'alien' power is so unbalanced and dangerous that they would basically force lower-tech civilizations to hold gladiatorial games to the death, with the civilization of the losing representatives getting wiped out completely.

How should the government react to that? There's no reason to think that playing the game actually accomplishes anything. From the government's perspective, after the 15th fight the Masterminds could have popped in and said "Hey, that was nice! By the way, we always lie to our pilots; we destroy your universe after the fights are over anyway." Or "Now fight another thousand robots, the TV show we run based on this needs higher ratings." Or "Give us 10% of your population in meat form, we want to eat you to prove our superiority."

The only sane response is to try and reverse-engineer Zearth's technology in the hope that it will provide some form of defense. Granted, it isn't a very good hope, but it's better than quietly letting your children fight to the death at the whims of evil madmen from another dimension.

It feels as though the writers want the Overlords to stand in for gods; we're supposed to just accept what they do and the rules they set, and the scientists are evil for going against this. Some are also shown as trying to get power and money, yes, but why is Kanji’s mother shown as evil, right down to having an generically evil face hamhandedly pasted on her? Because she values knowledge and the good of humanity even over the life of her son? Because she focuses on something that might actually matter instead of mindlessly trusting the homicidal maniacs who were making her son fight?

As far as I can tell, the kids aren't really doing anything to defend earth; they're buying time by playing along, sacrificing their lives to the Masterminds as a form of twisted tribute. Even if they all win, the earth is still just as much at the Mastermind's mercy at the end as it was before; and by staking the fate of entire universes on gladitorial games, the Masterminds have been firmly established as dangerous and insane.

Even the talk of 'releasing' people from the contract--what the show's writers apparently think the scientists should be doing instead of, you know, all that crazy-selfish research stuff that might eventually let humanity confront the Masterminds on equal terms--made no sense. The contract is not some random disease that the children are suffering from; it is an agreement they made with powerful Masterminds from another universe. No matter what technology is used, simply breaking it could just cause the Masterminds to destroy our universe by default.

I can't see any ending that doesn't confront the Masterminds in some form or another as being even remotely satisfying; and the only real way to do that is by reverse-engineering the bits of their technology that they let fall into our universe so they can be used against them.

I know that the anime has portrayed the scientists--except for Kanji’s mother, who has acted heroically in the defense of knowledge, earth, and her son, in that order, and has been inexplicably vilified for this--as greedy, shortsighted, and only interested in defeating other nations; most of them haven't been worrying about the Masterminds (except, again, Kanji's mother, who as far as I can tell has made the only effort in the entire series to confront them.) But I think that this portrayal makes no sense, as if the writers wanted to show scientists as evil, so they just gave them a muddled handful of bizarrely selfish motivations for no good reason.

Again: The plot to Bokurano, in a nutshell, is that we have been contacted by an advanced civilization, and they are threatening to kill us. And the show's moral is to vilify the scientists, politicians, and industrialists who could give us a way to actually do something about that beyond just giving the madmen from another dimension our children.