On lessons for the kiddies.

Ikuto is portrayed as having having some ulterior motive for following the directives of the Easter Corporation. It appears that he doesn't enjoy the shady work of Easter and he is even shown to be a love interest for Amu. The thing about Ikuto is that one of his main jobs is to clean up the X eggs after an Easter operation, and he does this by holding the eggs in his hand and applying pressure until they are destroyed. In other words, he crushes children's dreams... literally. In spite of this abhorrent occupation we are supposed to sympathize with his plights and consider him a potential match for the heroine. For some reason we are told to ignore the things that he has done as if his choices don't matter. The story shows him willing to defy Easter and help Amu, and in the future it wouldn't be surprising if he were to switch sides completely and join the guardians. However, changing allegiances wouldn't fix all those children whose hopes he snuffed out, so are we still supposed to forgive him in this case? At some point the concept of personal responsibility went completely out the window and he doesn't ever weigh the justness of his actions. "I was just following orders" didn't work at Nuremberg and it shouldn't work here*. Shugo Chara! is a show for kids and it shouldn't be teaching them that any act whatsoever is acceptable so long as you feel a mild discomfort when knowingly committing evil. Ikuto spends his time destroying the physical manifestations of children's hopes and dreams and faces no consequences for his actions. A properly moral show would depict all actions as having consequences, and bad acts would have bad results for those that commit them. Therefore, I cannot support a happy ending to Ikuto's story, I think that even if he were to switch sides and play a pivotal role in defeating Easter and by some unforeseen miracle all the damage he had done was reversed he should still face some terrible punishment for his crimes. At the very least he should have his hands cut off and his face melted with acid, then he should be shunned by all society and forced live in cave where his only contact with other humans occurs when local children throw rocks at him while he rummages through trash to survive. Well, maybe that is too much, but he should have to pay some price.

Shugo Chara! is all about believing in yourself and following your dreams but there should be a limit to the things you're willing to do to achieve those ends. If we completely abandon the instruction of ethics we will end up in the horrible amoral madhouse that cable news would have us believe we live in now.


Well, to look at it another way, I suppose the main lessons of the show could be: "if you're pretty enough you can get away with anything", and "life isn't fair". Two things kids would do well to learn early.

[*](Oh shit! I Godwin'd my own post. Well, at least I didn't try to make some link between the disregard of Ikuto's acts and Japan's view of its own atrocities in WWII. *cough*)