Looking at this series, I can really tell how good the manga must be. A bit more subtlety, and this really is an excellent look into the depths of corruption inside prisons. If it were so easy for one person (in this case the friendly guard), there would not have been a problem at all, however this episode showed that it’s really impossible for him to stand up to his superiors.
It’s way overdone, but heck, I’m really warming up to the themes of friendship here, and the bond between the lead characters. This isn’t just one-sided, in which An-chan protects the six ones around him because of the suicide of his former friend in prison. You can also see that everyone tries to return his favour, and help him out to defy psycho guard.
This episode also kept hinting at the practices of that really creepy doctor. I tried to look at some statistics about prison rape, and got quite scared of what I found. In 2007, there were already 70000 prisoners raped. Just think of how worse it would have been in a world recovering from the biggest war it had ever run into. I find it really hard to determine whether that creepy doctor is portrayed accurately or not.
Psycho guard is a bit too much though. Even though I have no idea how the minds of these corrupt officials work, he still feels like a caricature: for 24/7, it feels like he’s busy trying to make An-chan’s life miserable. Now there are grudges, and there’s hate so ridiculous that it just stops being believable.
Rating: * (Good)
I don’t think it’s so much hate that the psycho guard is feeling toward’s An-chan. It’s fear, and that fear is driving him up the wall. (Still, the psycho guard is a bit too much even with that explaination.)
Hi there,
I couldn’t find any contact info on your blog site so I decided to post something here. I just thought that I would share the L Sackboy I created. I’m a huge anime fan too ^^
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5UKFqDL63Y
~Nikki
“Now there are grudges, and there’s hate so ridiculous that it just stops being believable”.
Maybe you’re right that it is over the top, but isn’t that what they call a vendetta?
Anyway thanks for blogging this series!
This show has been decent so far, but I think I was originially expecting something a bit darker and more serious. The tone of the show just feels a bit off to me at times and the cheesy moments don’t help convince me otherwise.
On a different note in regards to the characters in this show. The corruption displayed by the psycho guard and even his over the top personality remind me very much of some of the results of the stanford prison experiment (and decently portrayed in the movie Das Experiment) where a group of civilians were randomly picked as civilians and prisoners and monitored throughout the study. Both those selected as prisoners and guards quickly internalized their role and the experiment was called off after only six days due to an alarming amount of violence and mistreatment from the guards.