Talk:Mei Misaki/@comment-25250949-20150419211534/@comment-397235-20150522035812

Using one fictional medium to excuse poor writing on another really doesn't prove your point. Talking for hours and hours straight is one think; telling someone "No" for once in your life is not.

Mei's written to be sympathetic, and she more or less manages this in individual scenes, but there comes a time where she seems to genuinely want to be a victim, like she realizes it gets her attention. You could interpret that as a sign of neglect, except for the fact Mei specifically says in the novel her adoptive parents dote on her and she's kind of a bitch to them anyway.

In a sense, the anime writers took things to eleven, because they put her in situations where she doesn't have to be victimized and she's either too lazy or genuinely too stupid to not be. Part of this is her learned helplessness, but the problem is every single time someone else bails her out of a situation they're essentially enabling it; even the fucking Calamity gets in on the action. If she's going to ever overcome this she's going to need the shit beaten out of her because she'll never be an independent person until she does.

She starts to show shades of this in the novel, when she chucks her phone in the river (although she seems to be blaming her problems on her mom, rather than accepting she's fucked up quite a bit herself); I think it was a huge mistake to cut this from the anime, since Mei otherwise shows no development: she's a quiet, withdrawn, and mildly self-absorbed girl at the beginning of the series and she's a quiet, withdrawn, and self absorbed girl at the end.