askchapo

I like Baki the Grappler, and if we try to derive politics from it besides Itagaki's awful attitude toward sex (except when it's dudes homoerotically beating each other up, I guess), I think it would be hard to conclude that it's anything other than bafflingly reactionary in a vaguely Nietzschean way, because there is basically never any notion of a common good that is taken seriously except as a vector for blood feuds, and instead everything is about the aesthetic-athletic existence of fighters who will throw away their lives and endanger others because . . . well, it's hard to say, but there's just sort of an agreement among the whole cast that death is preferable to not living up to a completely self-imposed warrior ethos.