T
ToeInTheWater
Guest
Re Rumic-world, I am familiar with her work as it was one of the first manga/anime titles to be translated into English, and I will say that while the sexual aspects are pretty tame compared too a lot of other anime works, they are there. Maison Ikkoku does show (discreetly) the main couple having sex before marriage (though they were fairly close to engagement), Urusei Yatsura features Lum insisting she is “married” to Ataru, and his girlfriend Shinobu openly called a “mistress” by some chatracters. (But there is no actual indication any of these characters are actually having sex, at least in the early episodes – I didn’t finish the series because it was a tad too zany for me.)
Ranma 1/2 I think is actually the least offensive of her major works that way, though it does have nudity and one “hentai” character, Happosai, who is a classic “dirty old man”, yet he doesn’t do much worse than running around stealing women’s underwear. The love triangles/squares/polygons and the violence are all played for laughs and obviously not meant to be taken seriously.
As for Inuyasha, I only watched the first two seasons but it is much more serious a work. It is somewhat like a Japanese take on medieval fantasy, but it’s based in the Samurai era of Japan. Also, while Inuyasha is called a “half-demon” and other characters are “full demons” in the English translation, they are actually NOT demons in the Western sense of being inherently evil minions of the Devil. They are called “Youkai” in Japanese and they really are closer to animistic spirits, so there are fox spirits, wolf spirits, etc. Now, the major villain, Naraku, is indeed evil through and through, but I wouldn’t say that’s because he’s a “demon”, many “demons” are shown as good or at least neutral.
I also found Kikyo to be one of the most complex, disturbing characters in that story. She is not a demon, she was a great, holy Shinto priestess when she lived, she dies before the start of the story and is later resurrected by a witch, unfortunately most of her soul has already been re-incarnated into Kagome, the heroine, and whatever is left of Kikyo’s soul appears quite corrupted and degraded. (BTW of course reincarnation is not a Christian belief but other than the idea that Kagome is the reincarnation of Kikyo, it really doesn’t play much of a role in the story.)
