'I must get stronger so that I can protect those I care about' trope

Can anyone elaborate more on this trope, cliche and lesson is so prevalent in most anime?

Fixed thread title, I think.

you know you can use the Chatterbox to ask a question like this, right?

Foolishness GAP, foolishness. Without power you cannot protect anything, least of all yourself.

Japan puts a lot of stock on familial values, friends are pretty much treated as close as family. Therefore protecting your friends is important. /Thread

'I must help those I care about get stronger so they can protect themselves even when I'm not around'.

We're never going to see that, are we?

Give a girl protection, she will be safe when you are around. Give a girl a lesson on how to protect herself, she will be safe even when you are not around. But women are supposed to be protected by men, so stick to the glorious Yamato Spirit and don't bother with it.

-sighs-

This is why Pretty Cure is good, because they themselves don't need help from men at all, fighting and protection wise.

edited 17th Dec '15 6:23:05 PM by Demongodofchaos2

Yea, but then you get the opposite end of the spectrum with the men needing to be protected lol.

Depends on the genre and if said "precious people" can protect themselves.

Actually, there a few supporting male characters in recent seasons that can hold their own, fighting and protecting themselves, just as well as as the Precure can.

It's interesting how that franchise is evolving, and is probably the most progressive kid series in Japan at the moment because of it.

edited 17th Dec '15 6:35:25 PM by Demongodofchaos2

It does occur sometimes but usually only if they have reason to believe the person in question would be able to protect themselves.

I understand your point, but the "I have to protect those precious to me" thing hardly only applies to female precious people and female characters are pretty likely to say it themselves.

Ichigo/Out of 10 Too Much Protecting...

edited 17th Dec '15 8:26:53 PM by Mizerous

Okay, people go on about family being "serious business" in Japan, but don't the large majority of cultures value family?

I'd say it's more Japanese works applying words like "strength", "lose", "forgiveness", "early" and whatnot in technically correct but really strange contexts which makes believe something is lost in translation, or, more likely, poorly translated.

I've got a skill, I can use it to protect people, so I gotta keep that skill sharp. That's hardly exclusive to Japan. Neither is wanting to get better after getting your ass handed to you or otherwise failing spectacularly. The hungry athlete who wants to be the best he can at his sport so she can make enough money to move her hungry family out of their hole in the wall would be a cliche if it wasn't both Truth in Television and Older Than Feudalism.

I guess it isn't limited to Japan as I see this stuff the most in Shonen, Kodomo and Seinen manga. I guess it can a universal motivation but why does it show up a lot? And does trope get analyzed, played with, deconstructed or reconstructed?

As far as I know, not really.

Maybe in Negima, Negi's like "I'm still too weak" and the others reply "You can't do everything yourself", except that... He mostly did.

It gets played with in 'One Punch Man'. I've only just watched the first episode, but the idea seems to be that he did indeed become the strongest, and now he's just utterly bored, since there's no challenge left.

I myself came here looking for the "I want to become stronger" (tsuyoku ni naritai) trope, but I guess it's not here, or I just can't find the right wording.

That's not quite the same because the main character of One Punch Man only became stronger for shits and giggles, not really to protect anyone or anything.

The only notable instance I've seen it explored is in Fate Stay Night and the first route; the main character constantly tries to protect his Love Interest of that route and gets his ass kicked repeatedly because their enemies are vastly stronger than him and said Love Interest is also vastly stronger than him, but insists on recklessly endangering his life for hers.

Sure enough, he's had his torso removed, kicked out of a window, stabbed in the spinal cord, and nearly cut in half from shoulder to hip. He had a Healing Factor he wasn't aware of, but yea. And he's constantly called out for acting like this, but he has a massive case of Chronic Hero Syndrome.

Well, obviously you want to protect those you care about, it's practically a tautology. And of course you need strength to protect something. It's really not hard to understand this train of though.

Are you guys looking for Japanese Spirit? There's a whole set of tropes in shounen that were set out in Fist of the North Star, then codified in their modern form by Dragonball, that can be traced back to samurai values.

You deserve it.

I guess it isn't hard to understand however but it seems prevalent in shonen.

Yeah.

edited 24th Dec '15 4:43:24 PM by GAP

Most shonen heroes are the same to me as a result. The only differences are some nuances. Or at the least the Shonen heroes that I've read about.

edited 24th Dec '15 4:30:49 PM by MadSkillz

The motivation of wanting to protect others is essentially how shounen distinguishes heroes from villains. Because, well, otherwise they'd be pretty much identical given that they tend to share the same flaws of overconfidence and the desire for strength. If they wanted to be strong for any other reason then they'd just be violent assholes. Sometimes they are anyway.

I don't think this has anything to do with sexism, since it's a gender-neutral motivation, but obviously they can also overlap.

I am pretty sure there is some works like say for example Tokyo Ghoul that deconstruct this to a serious degree but I could be wrong about that.....

edited 24th Dec '15 5:04:33 PM by Bleddyn

@Mad Skillz

Me Too

edited 24th Dec '15 5:23:36 PM by GAP