Reviews Anime / Master Of Martial Hearts

I personally have a problem with any time someone makes a show to criticize the fans for enjoying the product in question. Yes, I enjoy a show that screams fan service of any kind. Does this make me a monster because I enjoy gratuitous T&A? Of course not. That's a stupid suggestion. In fact, it's kind of worse to try and make a ton of money while at the same time accusing people of being monsters for enjoying a work of fiction.

I've had the same problem with like Sucker Punch and The Condemned. Some moron decides that he has to criticize people just for liking a fictional work as if they're going to turn around and do all of that in real life.

I found the premise sound, and the scenario plausible. Given how huge identity theft is in Real Life, it wouldn't be too hard to conceive "Miko" to assuming a fake identity and all required for the set up. There are several things that make this scenario even more plausible. The only part of the scenario that I took exception to is the "clothing made of tissue paper fights" except for the fight between the flight attendant and the Miko as the former used bladed weapons.

The Three girls showed the Platonic Hearts organization had infiltrated the police, the hospitals, and the media to make exposing the "fight club" far more difficult, and dangerous (not to mention making escape far more difficult as shown in the case of Aya's teacher.) The fact that the body double, and Aya's mother both indicated that the organization is far larger than we were shown helps handwave the plot holes about money, "recruitment," etc.

What bothered me most, however, is the fact that the ending raised far more questions than it answered.

• What happened to Aya's mother? If Aya, who was disabled by being shot in one leg and one arm can make it from the penthouse to an alley a block away, then her mother who was able-bodied should easily have been able to leave as well, even if she was carrying out one or more of the victims, like Aya's science teacher who was shown to be a good friend of the family.
• What happened to that parade of victims who were Mind Raped into Empty Shells? Aya's mother was shown to clearly have enough strength to break their chains with ease. So why didn't she? Were they even if the room? If not, where were they? *Just how big an organization are we talking about? It's implied to be a multi-national enterprise, as the body double clearly states this is the "Japanese branch."
• Who is the chairman? What's he going to do in response to this? CE Os, no matter how corrupt, don't just let their buildings get torched, especially with explosives and do nothing.
• Where did Aya go? The last time she was on screen, she was limping into a dark alley. Unless someone came along and got her in a vehicle, there is no way she could have gotten back home, or to Natsume's home quickly.
• Who opened the door to Natsume's home? We are not shown who. All we see is Natsume's mother attacking photos and dolls of Aya with a kitchen knife before the door opens and her horrified expression. Was it Aya's mother because the text she received dictated Natsume's mother to be her opponent? Was it one or more of those Men In Black mooks that came to take her back into the sex slavery she escaped from, at the cost of her voice? Was it Aya herself after being transported there? (because Natsume's mother had apparently not learned the fate of her children yet.)
• What happened to Natsume's mother? Is she dead, enslaved, fighting in the tournament? Or worse?
• Just how many "jewels" have to be collected before the "Platonic Heart" is assembled? Ie how many more fights are there left to go?
• Who the heck is buying these women? Yes, I know sex-slavery happens every day in Real Life, but transporting a bunch of women, some of whom were well known to the community out of the city can't be easy even with agents in the police and the media, and whoever it is can't possibly be happy about their "merchandise" being "lost" with the destruction of the high-rise at the end of episode 5.

Really, I don't care if the author was making a social commentary or whatever, but ending a series, especially a really short one on a cliff hanger, especially of this magnitude is very poor writing, especially if the writer has merchandise tie-ins prepared like virtual novel games, OV As and the like.

I checked out Ikki Tousen today after hearing about it, and it's a pretty ridiculous anime, but not necessarily in a bad way. Yeah, the premise is stupid, but as I said before, a lot of anime out there is fluff and crap. To me, fan service is more of a quantitative issue, meaning there is so much of it that we might catch ourselves adopting unhealthy views about women who are often the subjects of fan service. Being exposed to a set of ideas repeatedly does not automatically make one more inclined to engage in behavior associated with that idea, but it does affect your willingness to regard the idea as acceptable. Playing military shooter games will not necessarily make you more likely to go on a shooting spree (despite the insistence of some moral guardians), nor will watching fan-service-laden anime turn you into a rapist. It will, however, ideologically influence you in such a way that you will regard female objectification and female over-sexualization as non-threatening social conventions.

Master of Martial Hearts is like Funny Games, Spec Ops: The Line, Sucker Punch and other deconstructive works in that it attempts to interrogate the audience's passive appreciation of the subject matter associated with the genre. I caution people not to take deconstructive and critical works (especially satirical ones) as a direct personal attack. You can still have your fan service. I believe the message being made in MOMH and Sucker Punch is that you should probably take a step back and see how this is affecting your views on women. It's tempting to defiantly argue that watching violent movies all the time has no impact on your subconscious views on violence or to claim that watching titillating clothing damage has no impact on your views of, say, sexual assault. However, bear in mind that the human brain has a limited ability to engage in truly objective, non-biased information processing. We are psychologically conditioned to engage in things like confirmation bias, seeking out information that reinforces our world view while avoiding and rejecting information that poses a threat to our world view. We do this on a cognitive level because it's often ingrained into our personality; it is our sense of self. With all that said, it's often very difficult break those mental barriers we've spent so much time setting up because they are such a deeply entrenched part of who we are.

Receiving a critical interpretation of commonly accepted genre conventions does not automatically mean one should totally reject those conventions axiomatically, but that they should be more aware of the potentially harmful implications of those conventions when left unchecked. I still watch stuff with fan service in it. Sucker Punch and MOMH didn't stop me from watching more stories with fan service, but I appreciate these works because they cause me to stop and think about the ramifications of consuming this crap in excess. It's like fast food. It tastes really good, and if you're not careful, it will cause health complications. You can still eat fast food every once in a while, but if you blindly eat it all the time, you are hurting yourself.

How one executes a critical work is another matter. Sucker Punch was a good movie, and MOMH wasn't quite the train wreck a lot of people made it out to be. I appreciated the social commentary they were trying to stir up, but the execution was hampered by inconsistent themes, weird characterizations and a generally incongruent setup for the central conflict.

How you package your social commentary is just as important as what motivates you to express that commentary to begin with.

All things considered, I'd say Variable Geo did a better job of getting MOMH's point across, without meaning to.

If you look at it, VG uses fanservice in ways that are as disturbing to watch as they are titillating. For example: there's the girl Kaori defeats in her first match. We're never told her name, and what makes that important is, it puts a face on one of the darker side of the VG tournament. She knew the risk when she signed up for it, and knew the penalty for losing a level-1 match. But the allure of the tournament's grand prize and a chance at a better life outweighed it, in her mind... until she lost the match.

That's when the reality hit her. When the crowd starts cheering for her to strip and perform for them, she's horrified and tries to run away, but the tournament staff catches her and dopes her up. At first you think they're knocking her out with chloroform, but it's an aphrodisiac instead. Bottom line: once you lose, you either pay up willingly, or the tournament officials are gonna force you to do it. There's no getting out of it.

From there, the plot gradually unfolds, revealing a sporting competition that's anything but friendly. I think that sort of narrative is what MOMH was striving for, while attempting to deconstruct panty fighters, in general, but it just wasn't executed nearly as well as VG seemed to do it (since VG isn't intended to be a deconstruction in the first place).

I watched MOMH because I'd read all the bad reviews and wanted to see if it was as bad as it was made out to be. Overall, I can say I didn't like it, though it was mainly due to its technical merits (or lack thereof).

• the art and animation is substandard
• the character designs are fairly generic
• the fight scenes are ridiculous in that every strike results in Clothing Damage, regardless where they land (the back of one girl's fukku ripped open when she got struck in the chest)
• and the so-called reveals in the final episode came outta nowhere and amounted to one of the worst Gambit Roulette Pileups ever.

My own recommendation would be: watch it if you're curious, but there's a better alternative for getting MOMH's point across.

Thanks, Miin U. I'm going to check that anime out.

@Aprilla - Sure thing. I hope you enjoy it.