In the third episode of Ookami-san, the way they parodied a well known Aesop fable, The Tortoise and the Hare that its worth analyzing what the moral of the story they had in Ookami-san’s parody of the original.
Fanart used in this post is made by ちるく
In the original fable, the hare ridicules the tortoise for being so sluggish and challenges the to a race. Once the race started, the hare goes past the tortoise rather quickly. As a result of his lead over his opponent, he become over confident that he takes a rest. When he wakes up, he finds that the tortoise have already past him to the finish line rather steadily. The story between Ryuuguu Otohime and Usami Mimi is rather comparable to the original, but now placed in a real life setting
During their childhood, Ryuuguu Otohime was slow and fat. Because of her appearance, she was forced to do all the cleaning up after school and she lacked the popularity from the student body. In addition, she was referred as the tortoise. With some encouragement from Urashima Tarou, she gradually became more attractive after all the exercising and dieting. In contrast, Usami Mimi is referred to as the hare because she is overconfident. Compared to Otohime, she had an attractive appearance from the start. Since Mimi was attractive, she is very popular with the student body.
The story starts with Usami Mimi transferring to the same school where Ryuuguu Otohime attends. When they met, they challenged each other in a swimsuit contest to see who was the best. During the days before the competition, they had a mudslinging contest. Otohime eventually has huge disadvantage as a result of Mimi’s popularity in the student body since Mimi’s slandering of Otohime reached more of the student body. The advantage that Mimi had in her negative campaigning against Otohime represents the hare taking a huge lead over its opponent. Eventually, Mimi becomes too arrogant that she gets into an argument with Otohime and Akai when they were taking a photo shoot. As a result of Mimi’s arrogance, her popularity goes down while Otohime’s goes up. The argument can be compared to the hare’s taking a rest with his belief that his opponent would not advance that far when he wakes up. After the swimsuit contest, even though both of them did not rank, Otohime beats Mimi with one vote from Urashima Tarou.
From the competition between Ryuuguu Otohime and Usami Mimi, it illustrates the important moral of the story; it is never good to have excessive confidence since it could bite the person in the butt. Mimi lost the competition with no votes because she spent too much time smearing her opponent instead of showing her positive aspects of herself. Since Otohime focused on showing her positive aspects such as her beauty and personality, she eventually regains the popularity in the student body and persuaded Tarou to make that the one vote to beat Mimi.
In short, this was a very nice parody of The Tortoise and the Hare with a twist. The way they were mudslinging each other reminded me of the nasty aspect of political figures running for office running slanderous campaign ads against their opponents. On the other hand, it was innocence fun since the girls did not take it too personal and of course, they are cuter than political figures.
Moral of the Story in Short
- Being slow and steady will insure your victory.
- Too much self-confidence will result in arrogance which will hurt the person in the end.
- Having a close companion (boyfriend/girlfriend/best friend) that cares about you can insure a vote no matter what.
- Appearance isn’t everything… Personality matters too!
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