by chebmaster » 06 Apr 2006, 02:02
Не просто интересный. Автор - особенно в третьей главе - демонстрирует наблюдательность и психологическую достоверность, какой мне добиться не удавалось.
[quote]People who don’t like Genma Saotome (and there’s more than a few of them) often accuse him of being greedy, abusive, fat and lazy, but nothing could be further from the truth. Well, okay, so maybe it’s not all that far from the truth, but you have to admit that the characterization is exaggerated.
...Somewhat, anyway.
Sure he was beefy. But under what little flab he had was an even heavier layer of solid muscle. Genma was one of those people who somehow managed to be both fit and fat at the same time, like a sumo wrestler, or a football player. Think I’m joking? Let’s see you maintain a crane stance atop a three-meter bamboo pole. Stout Genma was, flabby he was not. One could speculate on what he might have accomplished if his ethics had been nearly as well developed as his physique. He may not have looked like much but he went toe-to-toe with Ranma on a daily basis and he usually came out on top. You try it sometime.
As for the charge of laziness, no one who is truly lazy could ever become a high caliber martial artist, and even Genma’s most serious detractors (and there’s more than a few of those, too) had to admit that he was indeed talented in the art. (Besides, you don’t see any of them getting up before dawn every day to spar with the boy, do you?) Genma didn’t see himself as lazy so much as ‘focused’ -- he didn’t like to waste much energy on anything other than martial arts. In fact, he liked to think of himself as somewhat akin to a lion, snoozing to conserve his resources when he wasn’t actually battling for supremacy. (Finished choking yet? To be honest, I don’t buy it either, but hey, this is Genma we’re talking about.)
The truth was a little more prosaic, if less complimentary: Genma was sort of an idiot savant. A near genius when it came to the martial arts, but a total screwup otherwise. Since the art was pretty much the only thing he was actually good at, he just didn’t bother doing much else. Any time not spent actually sparring was usually spent diligently thinking up new forms of training for the boy, a pursuit that could only be interrupted by the most pressing business, like breakfast, lunch, dinner, tea, snacks, shogi games with Soun, Go games with Soun, and his mid-morning and mid-afternoon naps.
As for abusive, you try to come up with ever more advanced training regimes capable of challenging a martial arts prodigy like Ranma and see how abusive you get. To give him his due, Genma honestly believed that he had Ranma’s best interests at heart. He really and truly wanted Ranma to be the very best. So he worked very hard to make him the very best. Unfortunately for Ranma, Genma was also an idiot, and hard work plus incompetence always accomplishes far more damage than mere incompetence on its own. (Fear energetic stupidity: it’s capable of doing a lot more harm than evil ever could.)
As for greedy…Well, there you have me. Genma was greedy. So sue me. But as a life-long piker he was only greedy in little ways: otherwise he never would have been happy with the hand-to-mouth existence of an itinerant martial artist. But he was, mainly because (again) he wasn’t much good at--or much interested in--anything else.
However, despite his manifold faults (Most of which his friends and his enemies were in full agreement on) Genma was not an evil man. No, what Genma was truly guilty of (besides the occasional larceny, burglary, forgery, and/or theft by illegal conversion) was being a little bit selfish and more than a little bit foolish (And who isn’t guilty of that every now and then?) in his single-minded (if occasionally half-witted) pursuit of his ultimate goal: forging his son into the ultimate martial artist and a true man among men.[/quote]