Aspect Analysis - I Want Them to Come Home: Law of Ueki

This is a bit odd to talk about so highly because overall this is not reflective of the quality of Law of Ueki on a whole, an anime I really like despite the show having a lot of issues. I will be spoiling it, but there is a character named Marilyn, and she is only really relevant for a brief few episodes despite her coming up somewhat early on in the series.

There is a tournament going on filled with one hundred contestants, and when you see the ones running this divine tournament they are discussing who may win, and of the five most likely to come out on top is a blonde girl in a military outfit.

It's a while before Marylin is actually introduced though, but what she is she stands out in quite a few ways. She is introduced as being part of this tournament just for the sake of fighting, as she has no desire to make use of the tournaments grand prize to give yourself the talent to do anything you want (A Talent for running, a Talent for leadership, manipulation, absolutely anything), and despite that her expression is oddly cheerful and soulless as she claims that she is simply here for the thrill of the fight.

Now, something you just kind of except about Law of Ueki up to this point, and that is that Ueki himself, the lead character, has this knack for being able to read people and get an idea of why they fight, and this always happens just as we the audience see the flashback of the villains backstory. The fight in question is very brutal, and as it goes on you see Marylin get more and more frustrated and angry, and you quickly start to piece together that she really doesn't want to be here.

Now, before we get into flashbacks, there is something I have never liked certain shows doing. There is a bad habit of some shows or games to just expect the audience to react to sad things happening to kids. It's lazy and uninspired writing, and a prime example of it is Grave of the Fireflies (I may get flack for that one). The kids that suffer in Grave of the Fireflies make you sad not because we see characters we like going through trouble, they are hardly even characters, it makes you sad because you see kids suffering. In the case of Ueki, you come to learn about Marylin. You see the devotion her teammates have for her, and here in this fight against Ueki, you start to realize the person you see and the reasons she is given for fighting aren't entirely true, so you grow interested in what got her to this point. It's at this point the flashback begins.

You already know she came from a military family, and as a child, you now see her in her country training with her friends, all old enough to actually be soldiers. When called off to War, Marylin is sad to see them go, but they promise her that if she keeps training and getting stronger they will all come back. It's at this point I think you all know where this is going.

She keeps up her training, improving her fitness, combat training, all sorts of things, and one day it is declared the War has come to an end. Still, her friends never came back. So she kept training, getting stronger, and hoping for the day they would return. Now, to the audience, it is clear that her friends died in combat, and the reason for her being here has nothing to do with the thrill of the fight, but her own denial of her friend's death. She wants to keep getting stronger to reach an impossible goal of seeing her friends again, because she doesn't want to admit to herself she'll never see them again.

And during the fight with Ueki, you start to see her composure break down in real time. The facade breaks entirely as the fight reaches its climax. That right there is the key to all of this, expert timing on the part of the script. The slow build up over the animes Arc when fighting Marilyn’s team, the well-timed glimpses of Marylin breaking her outer shell and letting out her emotions, and a Flashback involving her childhood right as the fight is reaching its climax, followed up with her full on burst of emotion as the climax hits. I'll avoid spoiling how it actually resolves itself though.

This is an odd series to give such high praise too, because while I really like the show there is no denying there are plenty of faults with the story, even surrounding Marylin herself (It's set in modern era, and yet here we are with a 13-15 year old girl with high amounts of military training an expertise, I'm talking full on special ops team shit, and it's not even entirely clear if she's even fought in armed conflict before), but the story of Marylin just hit's all the right beats for me. Well timed Climax, great build, and a flashback of children suffering that doesn't cop out and invests the time to make you interested in the person actually suffering.