Why is this toddler in the army???
Such a tonal whiplash to get a scene like this after a cutscene where a rebel faction is doing a pogrom on an ethnic minority, with fleeing civilians being shot on-screen
I know the reason is that most Japanese media is aimed at the youth and all these school-age protagonists are meant to be relatable to the target audience. (They also romanticise the fuck out of high school over there for various reasons)
The older I get the weirder it feels watching cutesy anime kids going to literal war. Idk, maybe I'm overly sensitive or something. It also always has vaguely fascist undertones to me
Its a leftover from Imperial Japan, pre ww2 the most schools in Japan were military schools so when they lost the war and people started making media (books, shows, etc.) they were influence by their time in the military schools and it became a common trope, you can see that nowdays with manga or game stories about teen protagonist fighting in a war or battle
honestly I thought it was just a 50/50 mix of imperial glorification and fixation on high school. huh. TIL about the military schools
You see in the west schools were mostly civilian in nature because they wanted to educate and rise workers for their industries, Japan however saw under meiji that they were very late to the imperialism game so they decided to focus on building a modern military in order to expand their power via conquests
Also Prussia was a huge influence