Discussion BrokenAesop / AnimeAndManga

• Bleach
  • One of the early Hollows was revealed to be responsible for the death of Ichigo’s mother. Ichigo furiously fights the Hollow for revenge, and refused Rukia’s help even as he was getting overpowered. Rukia respects his desire to fight alone after remembering a lesson she was taught by her captain that she might save his life by helping, but would forever kill his honor. We later get insight on Rukia’s past, when the line was spoken in regards to her squad’s lieutenant seeking vengeance against a Hollow for assimilating with his wife’s body. This proved to be a TERRIBLE decision that led to Kaien’s own body getting taken over and forcing Rukia to kill him, something that would deeply traumatize her. Hard to see why she felt that following the lesson a second time would have any positive results.

The way i see it it's not an actual Aesop, but rather a case of Values Dissonance. Soul Society is very much samurai-themed and samurai are well known for their Honor Before Reason attitude, which is very much kept here. There is also a fact that "breaking" the "aesop" are based on the assumption that a life is inherently more valuable than honor, which in-universe is clearly not the case, and even if we do assume that it's An Aesop this assumption would be the exact opposite of what the aesop would go for, therefore it's not broken.

• Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds, several times, gives the moral that "no card is worthless, just as no person is worthless." However, this is undercut by the fact that protagonist Yusei Fudo uses one of the most powerful decks in the series, full of Synchros ranging from rare to one-of-a-kind. What's more, every time he uses "worthless" cards to make this point, he quickly reverts to his usual Deck. It's especially obvious when the one time this strategy was applied against him (the enemy used low-level vanillas and an ace so Awesome, but Impractical it'd never been summoned before), he dealt the finishing blow with a unique superpowered dragon that'd been given him by a god from the future (one backed up by a friend's card, but still).

I'm disputing the last sentence of this. Last time I was here I deleted the last line because in context it fails to live up to the point being made by the paragraph. Yusei destroyed said Awesome, but Impractical monster using a card combo that didn't require him to attack with said "unique superpowered dragon" to defeat it, so it has nothing to do with the "no card is worthless, just as no person is worthless." aesop being broken either for or against. When I left this as the edit reason for deleting it the last time, whomever added it back couldn't come up with a counter argument and only used WeaselWords to pad over my point.

I'm going to leave this up for a week so I can have time to debate the point with the editor, then re-delete the sentence if I fail to be convinced to keep it up.