I think you're right, that it's only "religious" insofar as "morals" intersect with "culture", that what we estimate as requiring sanitization also reflects culture.
Frex, I never saw much made (if any) of Roy's wartime actions, by the English-speaking fandom. Other than as a cause for angst, but very very rarely as something that would have him tried as a war criminal. (And the one or two times I can recall, the goal was clearly to vindicate him, at the end.) Yet in the manga/original version, Arakawa comes very close to -- and then pulls back from -- a significant hot button for her primary audience. For the USian secondary audience, though, I think it's a button that doesn't even much exist. We don't have the same historical reference. Well, the button might now exist, post-Bush years, but that's for another post. Remind me later about mentioning this and I'll start the post that goes into what I mean, there.
Anyway, yes: you're right, there is a distinct discomfort with characters who are staunchly immoral. Thing is, xtianity itself -- at least in the US, from what I've seen -- is wrapped up in a moralistic flag as the most morally moral of all moral ways of being -- that you can't be one without the other, basically -- so it's kind of hard to tease out. That's kind of what I meant by the notion that such discomforts are buried really deep, and often unconscious.
There's the urge to sanitize, and part of that stems from the insistence that moral=good, but more than that, that "immoral" is that line that absolutely cannot be reversed and could never be positive. So it has to be cadged, hedged about, tempered in some way, like by interpreting the main character as somehow not entirely at fault. Creating wiggle room.
As for Kuroshitsuji, the anime is passable, with a bit too much filler, but it does at least hold to the emotional context of the story relatively well. Watch enough to get some idea, and then go right into the manga, which is where the real substance is.
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Date: 25 Oct 2011 08:25 pm (UTC)Frex, I never saw much made (if any) of Roy's wartime actions, by the English-speaking fandom. Other than as a cause for angst, but very very rarely as something that would have him tried as a war criminal. (And the one or two times I can recall, the goal was clearly to vindicate him, at the end.) Yet in the manga/original version, Arakawa comes very close to -- and then pulls back from -- a significant hot button for her primary audience. For the USian secondary audience, though, I think it's a button that doesn't even much exist. We don't have the same historical reference. Well, the button might now exist, post-Bush years, but that's for another post. Remind me later about mentioning this and I'll start the post that goes into what I mean, there.
Anyway, yes: you're right, there is a distinct discomfort with characters who are staunchly immoral. Thing is, xtianity itself -- at least in the US, from what I've seen -- is wrapped up in a moralistic flag as the most morally moral of all moral ways of being -- that you can't be one without the other, basically -- so it's kind of hard to tease out. That's kind of what I meant by the notion that such discomforts are buried really deep, and often unconscious.
There's the urge to sanitize, and part of that stems from the insistence that moral=good, but more than that, that "immoral" is that line that absolutely cannot be reversed and could never be positive. So it has to be cadged, hedged about, tempered in some way, like by interpreting the main character as somehow not entirely at fault. Creating wiggle room.
As for Kuroshitsuji, the anime is passable, with a bit too much filler, but it does at least hold to the emotional context of the story relatively well. Watch enough to get some idea, and then go right into the manga, which is where the real substance is.