It's been about a week now since I watched this episode of Onegai My Melody, and I still can't quite believe what I watched. I try not to spoil things for other people if I can help it, but I just need to make sure I didn't hallucinate this.
Episode 38 of season 3 (the 142nd episode overall) starts innocently enough. Protagonists My Melody and Uta Yumeno are walking along, deciding what to have for dinner when they stumble across an unusual scene: A bunch of vegetables, Eggplants & Carrots in particular, strewn across the ground, with holes mysteriously put through them.
Uta naturally questions this bizarre sight, while My Melody takes advantage of the situation and gathers up all of the vegetables.
I guess we have dinner for tonight all sorted out then.
Enter the narrator for this episode, as well as the series as a whole, Hedgehog-Kun:
With an ominous message of exploring the darker side of the city they live in, the episode then cuts to the truth of the hole-y ground vegetables:
So in what is some oddly dark humour, and quite the tonal shift, for a children's anime, it is revealed that the ground vegetables were the aftermath of a gunfight between sentient Eggplants & Carrots, complete with literal pea shooters. Yes, those vegetables they stumbled upon were corpses and the holes in them were fatal gunshot wounds...
Hedgehog-kun takes us back three days into the past to elaborate on the how and why:
It is revealed that this gunfight was the result of a turf war between the God of Eggplants & the God of Carrots
with heavy casualties for the Eggplants in particular. It's like that quote from The Untouchables: "They send one of yours to the hospital, you send one of theirs to the morgue"
Onegai My Melody then makes a pretty nuanced message for a kids anime, that revenge is a self-destructive endeavour. That the journey of revenge starts by digging two graves. Season 3 is the furthest along in the timeline as season 4 is a prequel to the first season, and, despite not being shown to die, neither the God of Eggplants nor the God of Carrots show up again. So it stands to reason that they fell alongside their comrades in the battle.
As the episode ends, it flashes forward to the present and shows that the only winners in war are those who directly profit from it, with My Melody and the Umeno family sitting down to a curry dinner made with the bodies of the fallen Eggplant and Carrot soldiers.
Does this make My Melody a war criminal? is there a better metaphor for the war economy? Am I over-analysing a particularly bizarre episode of an already bizarre show? The answer to all of these questions is: obviously, yes.
Episode 38 of season 3 (the 142nd episode overall) starts innocently enough. Protagonists My Melody and Uta Yumeno are walking along, deciding what to have for dinner when they stumble across an unusual scene: A bunch of vegetables, Eggplants & Carrots in particular, strewn across the ground, with holes mysteriously put through them.
Uta naturally questions this bizarre sight, while My Melody takes advantage of the situation and gathers up all of the vegetables.
I guess we have dinner for tonight all sorted out then.
Enter the narrator for this episode, as well as the series as a whole, Hedgehog-Kun:
With an ominous message of exploring the darker side of the city they live in, the episode then cuts to the truth of the hole-y ground vegetables:
So in what is some oddly dark humour, and quite the tonal shift, for a children's anime, it is revealed that the ground vegetables were the aftermath of a gunfight between sentient Eggplants & Carrots, complete with literal pea shooters. Yes, those vegetables they stumbled upon were corpses and the holes in them were fatal gunshot wounds...
Hedgehog-kun takes us back three days into the past to elaborate on the how and why:
It is revealed that this gunfight was the result of a turf war between the God of Eggplants & the God of Carrots
with heavy casualties for the Eggplants in particular. It's like that quote from The Untouchables: "They send one of yours to the hospital, you send one of theirs to the morgue"Onegai My Melody then makes a pretty nuanced message for a kids anime, that revenge is a self-destructive endeavour. That the journey of revenge starts by digging two graves. Season 3 is the furthest along in the timeline as season 4 is a prequel to the first season, and, despite not being shown to die, neither the God of Eggplants nor the God of Carrots show up again. So it stands to reason that they fell alongside their comrades in the battle.
As the episode ends, it flashes forward to the present and shows that the only winners in war are those who directly profit from it, with My Melody and the Umeno family sitting down to a curry dinner made with the bodies of the fallen Eggplant and Carrot soldiers.
Does this make My Melody a war criminal? is there a better metaphor for the war economy? Am I over-analysing a particularly bizarre episode of an already bizarre show? The answer to all of these questions is: obviously, yes.
