![\"RockAndRevy\"](\"http:\/\/sharkpuppet.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/10\/RockAndRevy.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nRock may be the easiest character to cosplay in the history of anime.<\/em><\/p>\n Rokuro \u201cRock\u201d Okajima could have very easily been an extraordinarily dull or irritating hero.\u00a0 As a white-collar Japanese businessman dragged into a world of organized crime and piracy, Rock initially serves as the audience\u2019s window into the fictional city of Roanapur.\u00a0 He asks all the stupid questions necessary to fill in the story\u2019s setting, and we learn the rules of the criminal underworld along with him.\u00a0 What sets Rock apart from countless other \u201cfish out of water\u201d characters is how he changes as a result of his experiences.<\/p>\n Rock\u2019s business experience makes him an ideal negotiator for the crew of the Black Lagoon, earning him a place on the crew of the titular torpedo boat.\u00a0 This position puts him in close contact with the heavy hitters of the criminal underworld, like Balalaika and Mr. Chang.\u00a0 Between these strong influences and the constant \u201cmight makes right\u201d resolutions to the series\u2019 plotlines, Rock slowly learns that the only way to get what he wants out of Roanapur is to become one of the people pulling the strings.\u00a0 This ambition is fully realized in the most recent story arc involving the Lovelace family, which shows Rock playing organized criminals, special forces troops, and a very unstable assassin against one another to achieve his goals.\u00a0 Over the space of nine volumes of manga (or two seasons and an OVA if you prefer the anime timeline), our mild-mannered viewer stand-in becomes an underworld mastermind who wouldn\u2019t be out of place in a series like Homeland<\/i>.<\/p>\n On the other hand, we have Revy, the heavily armed combat specialist of the Black Lagoon crew.\u00a0 Like Rock, Revy begins the series as a relatively archetypal figure: the partially unhinged gunslinger with a habit of letting her handguns do the talking.\u00a0 As we learn more about Revy, she becomes far more intriguing.\u00a0 Leading a life of crime since childhood has given Revy plenty of street smarts, but has also left her extremely damaged from an emotional standpoint.\u00a0 She\u2019s not the type to be fooled by anyone, but that goes hand in hand with an inability to open up to other people.\u00a0 For all her violent bravado, Revy harbors a great deal of doubt over her worth as a person.<\/p>\n Where does the cigarette smoke end and the gun smoke begin? Well played, dear illustrator.<\/em><\/p>\n Of course, that self-doubt certainly doesn\u2019t stop Revy from pursuing her own priorities.\u00a0 Even if she\u2019s unhappy about the person she\u2019s become, she\u2019s determined to make the most of her situation, even if that means hurting others (or putting a bullet in the head of anyone who gets in her way).\u00a0 Revy\u2019s worldview has a kind of Darwinian quality to it, although she\u2019d probably amend \u201csurvival of the fittest\u201d to \u201csurvival of the best-armed.\u201d\u00a0 She doesn\u2019t see herself as being above the occasional bit of grave robbery or human trafficking if it means getting a leg up on the competition.<\/p>\n Putting these two broken yet resourceful characters together is an obvious recipe for fireworks.\u00a0 Revy takes violent exception to Rock\u2019s idealism early in the series, while Rock is constantly infuriated by Revy\u2019s willingness to resort to despicable acts of crime whenever she feels it\u2019s necessary.\u00a0 Eventually, this tension morphs into a tentative understanding, and they begin to rely on one another.\u00a0 Revy uses Rock as a way of steadying her moral compass, and Rock comes to depend on Revy to bail him out when his desire to do good lands him in trouble.\u00a0 They effectively become one another\u2019s best way of staying sane in a crazy world.<\/p>\n Just as fascinating as this shift from opposition to alliance is the reversal of roles that Black Lagoon<\/i> offers us in this relationship.\u00a0 The action genre is filled to bursting with veteran soldiers and hitmen who rediscover their sense of right and wrong in the fight to save a damsel in distress.\u00a0 In Black Lagoon<\/i>, the genders of the main characters are swapped.\u00a0 To borrow fairy tale imagery, the princess is the one slaying the dragon to protect the knight.\u00a0 Of course, in this case, the magic sword is a pair of customized handguns and the dragon is an endless supply of bad guys with assault rifles.\u00a0 Revy and Rock remind me a bit of the equally understated relationship between Ripley and Hicks in the classic science fiction film Aliens<\/i>.<\/p>\n Perhaps my favorite thing about the \u201cromance\u201d between Rock and Revy is that it\u2019s never actually treated like a romance.\u00a0 There\u2019s no sweeping confession of feelings, no kiss in the rain, and no happily ever after.\u00a0 In fact, you could make a strong argument that Rock and Revy don\u2019t have romantic feelings for one another at all.\u00a0 The series is deliberately ambiguous about its heroes, leaving the audience to wonder if there\u2019s something going on between the two of them when the camera isn\u2019t rolling.\u00a0 It\u2019s a classy, subtle choice in a series full of gun-toting maids, arms-dealing nuns, and torpedo boats.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n You can buy the manga and anime versions of\u00a0<\/em>Black Lagoon from Amazon.com\u00a0here<\/a> It\u2019s easy to like Black Lagoon for its constant barrage of gunfights, car chases, and witty one-liners, but one of its less explosive strengths comes in the relationship between the main characters.\u00a0 There\u2019s a fascinating dynamic between Rock and Revy that develops over the course of the series, producing deadly tension and wonderfully understated friendship [Read more…]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/sharkpuppet.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/sharkpuppet.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/sharkpuppet.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sharkpuppet.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sharkpuppet.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=301"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/sharkpuppet.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":953,"href":"http:\/\/sharkpuppet.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301\/revisions\/953"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/sharkpuppet.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sharkpuppet.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sharkpuppet.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a><\/p>\n
\n<\/i><\/p>\nKawaii Overthink is written by Paul Jensen. You can follow his ramblings about anime on\u00a0Twitter<\/a>.<\/address>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"