I think a meta analysis of this is that the character in your quote should realize they themselves are inside of their own unique fig. The reason the others have withered is because she's chosen a fig. In real life, it seems that what usually happens is people don't realize they are heading for a fig that's not that bad all the while staring at all the others imagining how their life might be. Basically, be more grateful for what you have now.
In all the heartwarming animes I watch it goes like this: the main character has an absurd, unrealistic aspiration with a strong emotional motivation for it. She makes a lot of desperate and ridiculous efforts to get somewhere, and as a sort of karmic reward she gets somewhere else, not exactly what she intended, but a situation with a lot of fun and friendship and purpose develops, and it turns out that this is now what she wants and it serves the original emotional purpose just the same. However, the initial foolish aspiration was crucial or nothing would have happened.
That's a great approach to this issue. I believe this is exactly what happened to me, and to most people who are not "lucky" in having all the necessary conditions for their original "dream" to be realized. Anyway, the older I get, the more I believe there's no way a person can just have "one" dream the want to pursue their whole life, what you really want keeps changing every decade or less. I still remember what my dream was when I was 12 years old or 20, and I can tell you with confidence I am happy I ended up in a different place 30 years later.
Apart from that intial quote which to me sounds like road to absolute passiveness, thats my life so far.
Never had clear goal and wasnt given any, and I've massively surpassed anything anybody ever expected from me when growing up. But I largely let the flow of life take me as it went, and only in those few crucial moments when you are branching all your future life I went the harder but more interesting way and persisted despite hardships as long as it still made sense. Reasonable hardships are great, they often give back much more than initial costs, in many ways. And walking it alone without any external help is also sort of reward multiplier.
I am in a place in life in early 40s where I have nothing more to achieve or prove, just keeping the direction now is enough to be dying happy about life well lived.
Of course the last thing you wanna do in such place is to think you have it all set and figured out, life has nasty ways to remind you of the chaos just behind many corners.
I feel similarly. Pick the most interesting opportunity you’re aware of, seasoned with some realism. Excel to the best of your ability. Continuously increase your abilities. Leave everything better than you found it; but don’t exhaust yourself needlessly. Leverage the advantages you have and don’t mourn the ones you don’t.
To be fair, “anime protagonists” are not the same category as “arbitrary human” so in this context saying “she” actually does come off more like virtue signaling given the statistical prevalence of male anime protagonists
Statistical prevalence is irrelevant when talking about a specific person's experiences watching anime. They may predominantly watch shows with female protagonists, or they may have had just a few particular female-protagonist shows in mind when they wrote the comment.
Personally speaking (as someone who watches very little anime and has mostly only seen the famous ones, like Spirited Away and Kiki's Delivery Service), I think only ~10-20% of the animes I have watched have had male protagonists. It is surprising to me to hear that protagonists in that genre are mostly male, given my own overwhelming experience, and I'm not totally sure I believe it.
If you watch very little anime.. why would you presume to weigh in on this topic? Shōnen is the most popular category of manga / anime and it’s targeted at adolescent males with mostly male protagonists.
Because we aren't talking about anime in general. We are talking about one specific person's personal experiences with the subset of anime they watch.
If I say "she" when talking about generic protagonists in some Miyazaki films I've seen, are you going to say I'm wrong and should say "he" instead because some genre of anime I've never heard of is popular with some demographic I'm not a part of?
If that's really how you think, then do you also opine that we should say "she" rather than "he" when talking about generic human beings, seeing as women outnumber men? Somehow I suspect not.
Is there much Shonen that you'd describe as "heartwarming", though? I like stories about personal emotional growth, and magic. Wasn't using "she" for virtue signalling, just as what seemed to me to be a statistical fact. There's one I can think of with a male protagonist, and his great aspiration in life is to be murderer, and he targets his classmate, who is a tall and slightly dim-witted model ... and ends up filled with protective feelings toward her, which begin when he impulsively lends her his intended murder weapon (a boxcutter) to cut some card for a school project ... and by the end of the series they're going round a mall together at Christmas, holding hands. That was a pretty good one. Recommendations for ones with male protags are welcome, if they're not full of tanks and battles and so on.
