Recently I rewatched DearS again. Back in the days I gave it a rather emotional review. It was alright but it missed on the reasons why Ren is such a good girl. The reason is simple she does care about her master happiness and willing to do anything he tells her to. Nothing more, nothing less.
While Ren not always gets things right, but she at least tries to, her motivation is on point. She understands the core principles better than other characters.
Compare to her Neneko or Miu for example too much care about broader society. About their and Takeya's obligations to the people around them, to school, to parents, to the community, to whatever. Their commitment to these things essentially makes them act like a ward or a jailer to Takeya. Even if they love or like Takeya, they serve not him but someone else.
Ren is not like that, she can ignore everyone else for Takeya's sake, a quality very much needed in our modern world. Modern society is full of people who try to tell how one should act. Parents, school, celebrities all seek to control you in one way or another. They say it's for your benefit but it's only a lie. In reality they do not do it for your benefit, but for their own. I frequently white about this issue, just recently I wrote another article about that. In a world like that it's very important that a woman could ignore the noise coming from others and focus on one guy she actually cares for.
Despite her flaws, or more of because of them, Ren can do just that, ignore everyone and focus on Takeya and his wishes. Miu and Neneko alas could not do the same as they are too concerned what other and community will think of them.
In fact, the show also explores the issue of social rules and how they either shape or clash with personal needs. Guys like to watch porn but its social taboo so they could not discuss it openly. Men do not openly call their women slaves and so on.
In fact, Takeya himself is divided between his own desires and social expectations, he is bewildered by things people tell him and pushes back but at the same time he cannot just openly ignore school social norms or work. Neither he could call himself a master and order Ren around because that is not how relationships work in society. It the past I was like that too. As I grew older, I could better embrace my own desires while ignoring social conditioning. Nowadays I do not listen to feminists or society and demand female submission to my orders, wishes and desires.
Society suffocates individuality and individual needs for the sake of conformity to rules and "collective objectives". These collective objectives end up being nothing more than whims of those in charge, no matter how much they disguise it as "common benefit". Both human and DearS societies struggle with this issue, a be it in different ways. That gives all the more reasons to fight for one's interests and resist social pressure.
I wish DearS get a remaster one day, something that will make it look cute and shiny. Alas it shows that brainwash people into bending over for society and endure suffering that gets huge budgets for crisp animations and visuals. Through such shows masters in charge of society instruct their slaves on how they want them to behave. Human civilization is not yet advance enough to genetically engineer themselves their own DearS, so they resort to brainwashing instead. Well, actually technology to genetically engineer DearS is actually there, it's just those in charge lack creativity and outside of the box thinking to use it this way.
Sometime in future we will engineer ourselves our own DearS who will be the ideal lovers we always dreamed off. In the meantime we will have to make do with porn and shows such as DearS that do not preach moral from above but instead cater to wishes and desires of people who watch it rather than those who paid for it. Yes, art and animation are bad, but at least they animate what I want and enjoy seeing, not what some 50–60-year-old want younger people to be.
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