The Schemers - "All conditions have been cleared."

I think one of the most interesting things about the whole anime scene is seeing the marketplace of ideas at work. A new sort of protagonist or way of telling a story will be put out there and proven as being good and then, within a few months, you'll have new animes trying to build upon the new concept by trying to make a fresh and interesting take on it. Now this isn't the same thing as stealing, as unlike with Mass Effect, the new owners are making use of technique rather than actual material.

Try to think of the first episodes of Haruhi and Druaga to get what I'm talking about. The idea for the whole misleading-first-episode thing came from Haruhi and then the Druaga people said 'hey, this could work for us' and made that classic 'Jil's dream' episode. By taking a cue from the Haruhi folk, the Druaga people were able to make a complete masterstroke.

One idea that's been making the circulation lately is what I think of as the 'schemer character' and I'd like to talk for a moment about the interesting way in which this has been bounced back and forth...

The most well-known schemer characters are probably Yagami Light and Lelouch, so let's start with them.



Light is, as far as I can tell, the original schemer. If there is some sort of pre-Death Note figure that inspired him, then I am not aware of him.

Light is probably one of the most interesting characters I've ever seen. He's an ordinary upstanding man who believes in things like justice and equality who stumbles across the power to kill a person by writing their name in the book and immediately sets out to make himself into a god. What sets Light apart though is that, while he is a crazed serial killer, he's also in possession of a cold and nearly flawless intellect. He will hatch elaborate and occasionally ridiculous schemes to fool the police and take borderline super-villain-ish pleasure when they succeed. But what is most important is that he is the series' protagonist.

I will never forget the scene where Light was trying to discover the real name of that female detective whose husband he had murdered. How he weaved an elaborate web of lies to gain her trust and then...


Light is consistently portrayed as being a creature bereft of normal human emotion and, because the series is told from his point of perspective, Death Note essentially drags the viewer through the darker and uncomfortable corners of the human mind.

But even through Light's virtues, you can already see the flaw... if he's the absolute sort of evil, it becomes difficult after a while to have any affection for the man. He's just too remote from the average human being. At no point is he an unbelievable character, but he's just still not a character that many people can really relate to.

And that is really what brings us to Lelouch...



(Note that I am talking about the Lelouch of the original Code Geass season, not the second season which ruined the character)

On the surface, Lelouch is a lot like Light. He had a relatively ordinary existence until he stumbled across a tremendous supernatural power that gave him the ability to fundamentally alter the world. There are of course many more differences (Light wants to be a god while Lelouch is more of a conventional conquerer, etc.) but you can nevertheless see how the base of the Light character template is being employed for Lelouch here.

But what makes things interesting is that while Lelouch is cold and ruthless, at no point is he inhuman. One of Lelouch's first acts in the series is to murder his half-brother in cold blood, but that's not really what got my attention about him. Rather, it was this...


When Lelouch recalls what he did later in the day, he throws up. Lelouch justified the murder at the time by essentially saying it was to serve a greater good, much in the same way that Light did when he was on his killing sprees, but there's always a part of him that constantly screams that what he's doing is wrong. Sure he'll hatch Light-like schemes to get the better of his rivals and often destroys those close to him along the way in order to further his plans, but his sins gradually become a sort of tangible burden upon his shoulders. By giving the concept of Light a conscience, Lelouch really becomes a tragic hero in the old sense.

Both Light and Lelouch go down the route of being rather intimate pictures of amoral geniuses though, which is why I find this man to be particularly fascinating...


This is Toua Tokuchi and he's pitcher for the Lycoans. And yes, you read that right.

(It would probably be more accurate to call Toua the successor to Akagi, but I haven't seen Akagi yet so...)

One Outs is a show that really deserves its own blog post, so I won't go too much into the details here, but Tokuchi is the same sort of brutal genius that Light and Lelouch are. The gist of the story's premise is that every time Toua gets an out he makes 5 million yen but for every point he gives up he loses 50 million yen. He obviously never kills anyone (or at least he hasn't yet), but his technique is to wage elaborate campaigns of psychological warfare and deception in order to not only beat but also completely destroy the opposing team.

If you think that sounds stupid because it's baseball, then I don't want to hear it. I hate baseball as much as anyone else, but the point of One Outs isn't baseball.

What's interesting about Toua though when you compare him to Lelouch or Light is that he's completely opaque. He's the protagonist, but the show never presents his thought process or we hardly even get any idea of his motivation. Rather instead, most of the show is told from the perspective of the batters that have to go up against him as they try to second guess themselves. The show is really about what it's like to be pitted against a cold and malevolent human intelligence, rather than to show what that intelligence is like inside.

But again, I'll talk more about it later... I think by now you can figure out what I'm saying.

It's this sort of community of ideas and concepts that keeps the quality of Japanese fiction so damn high. Imagine for a moment if instead of 'hey let's take the basic Star Trek formula, give it a female captain and throw it into a different part of the universe' they had said to themselves 'what actually made TNG so good and how do we take that idea and do a new take on it?' Or imagine if Mass Effect had actually looked at the spirit of its influences instead of just going down the wholesale plagurism route.

If more of that sort of thinking went on over on this side of the Pacific, then I think that maybe we'd have something that's just a bit better than the gimmicky drivel that pollutes our bookshelves and televisions these days.