Discussion Main / InTheBlood

Per TRS, wicks relating to evil or evil attributes being hereditary have been moved to Villainous Lineage.

Previous Trope Repair Shop thread: Misused, started by Wuz on Jan 18th 2017 at 10:46:01 AM

This entry has a lot of word cruft so bringing it here for discussion.

• YuYu Hakusho:
  • Yusuke has distant demon ancestry. Though it's not dwelt on much, partly because by the point in the series it comes up things have gotten to be semi-pure action, far far away from the series' roots as a chronicle of the reflective character-building experiences a delinquent can have while a ghost, probably because Togashi had gone mad with power by this point, a while after our hero has come back from the dead as a demon because of Mazoku ancestry, he has become relatively okay with the less uncivilized gradations of human-eating, and when Raizen is about to die due to self-imposed starvation offers insistently to go find him someone to eat right away. Earlier in the series he got incredibly angry about any cannibalistic tendencies, and drew huge lines between 'killing demons,' which he had done a good deal of, and 'killing humans,' which he really really did not want to have to do. Could just be an implicit redrawing of the Fantastic Racism lines, with demons no longer suffering from What Measure Is a Non-Human? because he wasn't human. So it might just be a really strange form of a perfectly reasonable Aesop, and/or Reverse Getting Crap Past the Radar due to not treating it like it's important. Intended to cause Fridge Logic, probably. Altogether weird.
  • Hiei, on the other hand, turns out to be the victim of the idea of this in his back story: being male shows he has outcross blood, which among the Ice Maidens means (precedents apparently show) that if they keep him around he will grow up to kill everyone. So they throw him over the side of their Floating City, the woman doing the throwing whispering that she expects him to come back and please kill her first. They may or may not have been correct: yes, he is a psychopath from childhood, and actually mellows out the more grown-up he gets, and yes, judging by his facial expressions he was one evil baby, but that could be a combination of Self-Fulfilling Prophecy (though come to think of it, it doesn't), the trauma, and the fact that all babies are extremely selfish little creatures and if they were, like Hiei, sapient they probably would be kind of evil. He understood everything. (The 'source of evil' here is either 'every race except our own' or 'the male sex,' or both, because they don't have males. They clone themselves every hundred years.)