Roy Batty and Keigo Atobe

Apr 13, 2007 06:26




"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams ... glitter in the dark near Tannhauser Gate. All those ... moments will be lost ... in time, like tears ... in rain. Time ... to die."

Roy Batty, Blade Runner (source)



I was reading Atobe's game against Ryoma in the train the other day, and the first thing I did when I read about his "Tannhauser serve" was to comment to my friend sitting next to me, even if I knew she didn't care about PoT, because I just couldn't help myself: "That so reminds me of that famous last lines in Blade Runner, do you remember?" "No", she hadn't seen the movie.

Actually, I later learnt Tannhäuser is the name of a mythical German knight, and the title of an opera by Richard Wagner.

That's the most likely explanation, as Atobe seems to be a germanophile (Eins, zwei, eins, zwei, drei, vier...Hyooooutei, Hyooooutei...), so maybe I shouldn't try to see beyond that. But let me try.

That very day I returned home at night and made the hatehatehate post about how much I had hated Ryoma's behaviour and the decline and fall of the PoT fun. And the following day, while I was having a shower (WC + shower = inspiration boosters) it dawned upon me that, hey, Atobe being frozen on the spot exhausted to unconsciousness did resemble A LOT the way Roy Batty died in Blade Runner.

In case you haven't seen it but don't mind spoilers, Roy Batty is a replicant, to cut a story short, a kind of powerful and superior artificial human who has a life span of 4 years and who in the movie (as the book is almost completely different, I happened to read it a couple of months ago) is seeking for his creator to give him longer life. But nobody can do that and in the end Deckard,the blade runner, a replicant hunter in the skin of no less than Harrison Ford, finds and fights him in an attempt to eliminate him (something a bit meaningless as he is going to die anyway). Roy is much stronger and clever than him, so Decker is a bit powerless, but when the moment comes for Decker to fall from a window sill and die, Roy pulls him up and gives him that reflection on his life that has become part of sci-fi history and movie quotes favorites, before he completely stops moving, ceasing to function, dying in front of his enemy, whom he has allowed to live to bear witness of his last moments.



This is how the movie ending differs from that of the book: (source)

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe
Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion
I’ve watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate.
All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain.”

In [the book] Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? the name is Roy Baty and this is his death scene.

“He shot Roy Baty; the big man’s corpse lashed about, toppled like an overstacked collection of separate, brittle entities; it smashed into the kitchen table and carried dishes and flatware down with it. Reflex circuits in the corpse made it twitch and flutter, but it had died…”

The wonders of film adaptation.

Yes, well, it happens with manga and anime too, also for the better sometimes.

There is this interesting interpretation on him: (source)

Replicant Roy Batty beats the hell out of Deckard during a long, drawn-out battle (the fact that Deckard survives gives strong evidence to the "Deckard is a replicant" theory).

Having demonstrated that he's more than capable of the sort of animal brutality that's expected of his kind by most humans, Roy does not kill Deckard, instead he gives a poignant soliloquy and lies down to die at the end of his planned four-year lifespan. Roy displays the quality of empathy, and in so doing he embraces his humanity in the very moment that his existence ends.

Empathy, according to both the book and the movie, is the quality that makes humans human, in contrast to cyborgs and replicants.

(In the manga, Atobe shows more empathy in general than Ryoma, but that isn't the point now.)

What matters to me is the way he dies. He stops functioning, just like that, proud and glorious at the best of his life. Frozen but still powerful. Much like Atobe at the end of his game against Ryoma.

And what about the hair? Too yellow, yes, but...



Maybe Konomi didn't have Blade Runner in mind in the very least, which is most likely. But the question is: what if he DID?



Just imagine a tennis net between them...final moments of the game...both sprawled on the court...who will stand first...only to be frozen...

Any input, knowledge, discussion, NO WAY!s?

pot, this might be going nowhere but well, look what i write at 6 am, i can't really stop thinking about it

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