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Old 06-02-2018, 04:07 AM
Mazryonh Mazryonh is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Excalibur View Post
I thought so too. Thinking how an Americanized version would take away about of the original point of the story. The actual book was very nationalistic for Japan and even the writer wrote off why America didn't get involved in an actual attack on Japan by a foreign power. The defense treaty would been used regardless and we'd see a combined JSDF and US military presence in the story but there isn't.

I'm sure if this was adapted for America, they'd make it a satire of US military involvement in foreign lands as a negative instead of moral superiority of the Japanese military is portrayed in the Anime and book.
It's not uncommon for these kinds of stories to ignore or downplay American involvement. If you look at the wiki page for Brotherhood of War, a film based on the Korean War, only the North Korean and South Korean forces get much of a presence in that film despite the UN and ChiCom involvement. I don't know if you can call that "patriotism," but leaving viewers/readers with the impression that "it happened on our soil and we did all the work" isn't hard to find in this kind of story.

There's another reason Rory Mercury is a Japanese in-joke. "Rory" to them is pronounced more or less the same as "Loli," because they don't make much of a distinction between "L" and "R" sounds. So the pun (that Rory is a loli-type character) doesn't work much outside of Japanese.

As for what the "moral guardians" would say about characters like Rory, more especially if she were put into a live-action adaptation, I advise you to check out the passage from this article where a former Vogue Editor-in-Chief received a firestorm of protest about putting a model on the cover of a 2007 Vogue issue, photographed in a treehouse.

If that gets real-life people reaching for their torches and pitchforks, I don't know what Rory Mercury's plot elements, including what she planned to do with Itami, would provoke if they were more well-known.
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