Boku no Marie Episode 3 Discussion

mozgow said:
THIS IS AN ANIME ONLY DISCUSSION POST. DO NOT DISCUSS THE MANGA BEYOND THIS EPISODE.
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Creators of this anime must have a lot of fun making this episode.
It was so random and at the same time highly entertaining :-)

Why older, really good anime are so short?

_Comprehend_ said:
Just finished the show. I gotta say, there's almost certainly a deeper message behind the show, but I can't say it's deep the way evangelion is. In evangelion, you can extract meaning from the more "arthouse" parts because there's a lot of context which is given by the characters. I really don't think the characters here were suited to telling the message the author intended. Or if he even intended to say half of what I think he might be saying. I dunno. Certainly, it's a commentary on how idealisms affect the way we live, but I don't know exactly what it's saying.

glassknuckles said:
This was really great, very enjoyable.

Ep 3 was a very fine piece of science fiction. This was a very well done dream episode, ending in a state in which it is uncertain whether the dream has ended. We do have the stereotypical robot story in which Marie asks through the dream if she is more than a machine and is allowed to love, a fundamental human right. We might question whether societies view all women as machines- for example, when drafting the One Child Policy the CCP insisted that women's fertility was a quality that could turned on and off.

I feel like I would be called onto the carpet for suggesting My Dear Marie is the equal of Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer, but I feel that I enjoyed them both equally for what it is worth. This episode makes allusion to Philip K Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? but I was also reminded a bit of Mr. Data's search for meaning in dreams in a fabulous episode of Star Trek the Next Generation.

I thought the incorporation of the sexual predator Tanaka in episode 1 and again here was really well done, since it realistically depicted the way these men are not punished and are 'respectable'; I felt the way the character was used expressed a truth of reality; ultimately the story moves from Marie being an artificial Cyrano de Bergerac to trying to move outside the boundaries of the fictitious brother-sister relationship. I wonder if the frank depiction of impropriety, eg. Tanaka the male predator, Hibiki's attempted rape (female on male date rape to be precise), and Karigari's siscon tones in ruffled any feathers back in the 1990s when this was brought to the US.

I wish there was more of this.