I recently watched a show that started by having a mysterious girl from another land show up, and the main character (somewhat immature) fell about in love with but took a while to realize it. The girl was pretty shy about her origins, had the strange ability to pull things from seemingly another dimension, and the ability to engage enemies enemies in close combat with an unconventional melee weapon.
Ya, it's pretty obvious where I'm going with this, but one of the biggest things I came away from FLCL thinking was that it must have been at least a little influential to the Scott Pilgrim books. How much this is actually the case I can't say for sure, since I can't find anything online to support the theory, but it is confirmed for instance that Byran Lee O'Malley drew a lot of his character design from Tezuka and Azuma, which makes the likelihood that O'Malley was at least familiar with FLCL almost certain. (Slight mid-writing edit: just found this screen-cap, which seems like it's probably legitimate.
As I hinted (well, perhaps an understatement, but still) if nothing else the two stories share a lot on the surface level. They are tales of 6 parts of young boys heading towards adulthood and all that entails, and maturing to some point along the way with the help of the main female protagonist. The worlds are a bit wacky and some of the situations patently staged, and we never quite find out why things the way they are, but that's how it is. There's the main quest for the main character (Scott, Naoto) to earn the love of the female character (Ramona, Haruko), a secondary female character (Knives, Mamimi) towards whom the main male fluctuates in how he feels, and a main father-figure who probably helps as much as he harms (Wallace, Kamon), among other things. Obviously it's not always a 1:1 correlation and there are probably as many differences as there are similarities, the core structure has a lot of parallels.
If you dig a bit deeper, the deeper message also shares a lot of similarities. Both the main characters are leading normal lives in which there aren't a lot of problems, but for whatever reason they're not satisfied with their current situation. While the entrance of the girl causes a ton of problems, it also gifts them the chance to change their life for the better, and the stories become that of maturing and growing up. They end up going about it different ways, and the ending of both works are pretty different, but their goal is roughly the same.
Perhaps more importantly, both of them spoke to me on some emotional level. While obviously the events of my life don't mirror either Scott or Ta-kun's, I still identified with them and their plights to a certain extent. Perhaps the ambiguity (moreso with FLCL) helped a lot with that, but for whatever reason the stories ended up meaning a lot. Perhaps, and maybe even likely, this will cease to be the case in a few years as they end up being what The Demon Ororon was to my early high-school self, but at the current moment I enjoyed both quite a lot.
What does this all mean, though? I'm honestly not quite sure. :-P If nothing else, I think it's interesting to compare the two, and it also follows in my recent interest in figuring out what interests me. If I come up with anything more, I'm sure you can expect another blog post. And to end, a photo I found via Google Images and couldn't find who did it, so I'm afraid I have to leave it without credit.
-HTMC
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