Okay, let’s get it out. I love this series, manga and anime alike. It has cute, moe girls, technical superiority, attention to detail, and tons of vivid characters. That’s normally enough to make me like any series, but let’s move on to more critical reasons, now.
First of all, there’s the psychology involved in the characters’s interaction. The juxtaposition of innocence over the girls’s deadliness is definitely one of the alluring factors of the series, but the writing doesn’t stop there. The mental conditioning the girls recieve, part of the technology presented, create a strange struggle between what the girls want to do, opposed to what the girls think they want to do, or have to do. Henrietta, being the manga and anime’s central focus for this theme, is the prime carrier of this, often admitting she cannot tell where the conditioning starts and her feelings for Jose begin. Even then, her innocence prevails and allows her to accept them both as part of her. Triela, as her older mentor, is a bit more hesitant to do the same, but she is also older and at an age when personal identity is becoming an frontal issue. Even then, she seems to dismiss it in her own way, since there really is nothing that can be done about it. The handlers’s relationship to their girls is also quite vivid, and the effects of their “parenting” is realisticly drawn out.
(Before I continue, I’ll say this: I agree with the bentophysics people in that this anime is about military exploitation if and only if you are stupid. That kinda ties into my next points though.)
That still doesn’t explain why it’s so awesome to someone like me, though. The “innocent young assassin” concept isn’t anything new to the world of manga and anime, but Gunslinger Girl is far more successful in its most compelling depictions than anything else I’ve seen. The usual way to approach the “innocent young assassin” storyline, on the other hand, is have that character act as the main character, or write the script so that another with similar characteristics (age, etc) is providing the most vivid projection of him or her. These stories are also almost exclusively targeted at boys, providing a sort of fantasy escapism world in which someone like them lives in an violent world, superior to people many times their age, and such.
But in Gunslinger Girl, there seems to be another approach being taken. For one thing, the girls’s moe factor is ridiculously high, leading to one other thing: the target audience is supposed to empathize with the girls not from their perspective or the perspective of someone at their level, but from the perspective of the handlers, the beings on which they most rely on. I would say that part of the definition of moe characters is that they are written into these positions (which leads to a whole other set of questions about other series…).
There’s also another difference in the matter of how the story is written for us to percieve the girls. These types of series constantly remind us of how “normality” in our world imply that these children would be living far more carefree lives, while the run-of-the-mill story uses it to reinforce the reader’s perspective with the characters’s, Gunslinger Girl does so to reinforce the moe factor. Although they are pretty much invincible fighting machines, between missions, there is a great effort to present them as unrecognizable from the little sister or niece of their handlers, and sometimes even during. The premise of the gitai cyborg bodies is also inherently catering to this moe sentimentality – even though in combat ability they are likely far better and actual physical protection often flows the other direction, the girls are relying (to varying degrees) on their handlers for everything else. And that, in a way, defines what the moe appeal actually is.
In any case, from a technical sense Gunslinger Girl is already above the crowd. The writing and delicate maneuvering of the psychologies of the girls and their handlers takes it up several more notches. And if you are as subject to the effect of characters as moe as these, the series can only become unforgettable.
Posted by omoroiyarou 