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©浦沢直樹/長崎尚志/手塚プロダクション ©浦沢直樹/長崎尚志/手塚プロダクション/ 「PLUTO」製作委員会
Does hatred ever leave you or does it remain a part of you forever?
PLUTO’s thesis on hatred and war begins to coalesce in these episodes as the avenging robot takes down the beloved Atom, the formidable Heracles, and we meet the child-like robot’s ancestor, Dr. Tenma.
Naoki Urasawa’s reimagining focuses on hatred like a growing boulder, obliterating everything in its path. According to Dr. Tenma, it also acknowledges that it is an emotion that defines humans and that any attempt to emulate humanity requires the possibility of hate. It is for this reason that Brau-1589’s artificial intelligence is considered perfect even though this robot became the first robot to kill a human.
The advanced robots in the series frequently struggle with their own growing feelings of hatred. Hercules did not understand it during the war but became more familiar with it when he reconciled Brando’s death. Many characters are united by their hatred, even when it is directed at each other. It would be more accurate to say that they are united in a sense of injustice, since all the characters’ hatred comes from the unfairness of justice towards them that puts them in conflict with each other. You can trace a line from each character’s tragedy to their perpetrator and from that perpetrator to another tragedy. This pushed people like Adolf down a path of extermination and extremism, but even that did not germinate naturally.
Arguably, the original miscarriage of justice lay at the feet of the United States of Thracia, which, despite no evidence to support its claim, invaded the Kingdom of Persia and sowed its seeds. resistance to terrorism. They learn nothing from their actions and seem to have no qualms about their hypocrisy; as early as episode two and repeatedly in episode four, they called on Professor Ochanomizu to proceed with their own plan of having more weapon robots. It was Thracian’s indiscriminate violence against non-combatants that led to the deaths of Professor Abdullah’s family, and now we find him collaborating with Dr. Goji on the Pluto murders .
You could also see Adolf’s extreme bigotry toward robots as a misguided indictment of the system that made his father obsolete. Unable to find a new job, he turned to petty crime and was eventually arrested. Adolf’s brother follows in his footsteps, but it’s not until episode five that we get a clearer look at what led to his death. His brother is not a petty criminal but a real serial killer who clearly targets robot children. There’s a whole psychology there to learn: how one man started targeting the happy children of robots, the very robots he blamed for losing his own family when he was young. small. No one denies that Adolf’s brother was a horrible individual, including the robot extremists. He clearly considers robots a sub-species, which based on everything we’ve seen so far, could also be an allegory for the common bigotry of the ancients. Robots have human-like functions; Even primitive models can experience sadness, except for the lack of flesh and the ability to kill. It’s better to look at Adolf’s brother as a child murderer; It doesn’t matter that the kids are machines.
But Adolf’s hatred was still born from injustice. Gesicht murdered his brother while he was unarmed and was captured. We can understand why Gesicht killed him for all the reasons mentioned above; Additionally, there are suggestions that his latest victim is Gesicht and Helena’s stepson. Gesicht, in a moment of “humanity,” imposed the death penalty. It’s not unlike the final confrontation in David Fincher’s Se7en. To keep their investment clean, Gesicht has only fragmentary memories of this and it’s unclear whether he remembers his child at all.
Despite their different origins, Gesicht and Dr. Tenma are not so different. Much of the story revolves around the Central Asian War as well as the death of a child. Hailed as a genius by his peers, Tenma is a man consumed with grief after the death of his son, Tobio. A single event, an unfair accident, becomes the axis of his entire world. He uses all his abilities to create Atom, a robot with deep empathy and too industrious to be a clone for Tenma’s fussy and messy Tobio. He believes that Atom is a “failure,” but his measuring stick is off. Atom is a failure because he lacks the ability to hate. Atom did not suffer like Tenma, Gesicht, Adolf, Abdullah, and of course, Pluto did.
Tenma’s quest to recreate humanity with a mechanical shell may have set things in motion. His perfect robot that had never awakened might have stirred when he wasn’t looking. Who knows what happened to it and what it became?
Pluto is currently streaming on Netflix.