Doraemon

During the one year I spent living in Japan and going to Japanese kindergarten, I fondly remember reading Doraemon comic books/manga. Doraemon is a robot cat from the future who lives with a little boy named Nobita. Nobita happens to be a whiny loser with only occasional flashes of moral fiber and likeability. The diligent Doraemon, armed with futuristic gadgets, tries to help him improve his family and school life.

Although I could read very well in English by the age of 6, I couldn't read Japanese at all. So I would make my dad translate the comic books for me, panel by panel. If it was up to me, I'd have "read" Doraemon like this all day and night. My dad would always get tired after about 20 minutes, though. If he tried to just stop translating I'd command him to continue, so he'd rebel by inventing completely inappropriate translations. "In this panel, Doraemon says he wants to have sex with his sister", he would say. Then I would yell "No he didn't I know he didn't say that that's not what he really said stop doing that just tell me what he really said".

My favorite Doraemon plot that I still remember strongly is one I think of as "Nobita's Loser Ancestor". This is how it goes. In school everyone has to give a class presentation on their ancestors. Two of Nobita's classmates are mean kids who always bully him. I remember them as "Fat Boy" and "Snail" but looking them up on Wikipedia they are actually "Takeshi" and "Suneo". Takeshi's ancestor was a samurai, and so Takeshi gives a loud bragging presentation about how awesome his samurai ancestor was. Nobita goes home and asks Doraemon if his ancestor was also a samurai. Doraemon pulls out one of his time-travelling devices and shows Nobita the past. It turns out that Nobita's ancestor was a hunter. Apparently in feudal Japan hunters were absolutely the lowest of the low. Being a hunter was much, much worse than being a peasant farmer.

Seeing that his ancestor is also on the bottom rung of the social hierarchy depresses Nobita so much that Doraemon has to take pity on him. They travel back in time to see if they can do anything to change the situation. In fact, they find Nobita's ancestor being bullied by Takeshi's samurai ancestor and Suneo's samurai suck-up ancestor. Nobita has two more of Doraemon's high-tech gadgets: a cloak of invisiblity and a glove of power. He uses these devices to help his ancestor. Hijinks ensue, and the samurai bullies are defeated. Before Nobita and Doraemon go back to the future, they give Nobita's ancestor the cloak of invisibility and the glove of power. Nobita also gives him a quick history lesson which probably had something to do with the existence of unprecedented social mobility during certain points in the feudal era. Nobita's ancestor is supposed to take the cloak and glove, leave his forest, kick some samurai ass and turn himself into a lord with his own castle, ennobling his descendants and thereby giving Nobita something to brag about when he does his genealogical class presentation.

As always in Doraemon plots, Nobita's stupid idea backfires. When they check up on Nobita's ancestor using the peering-back-through-time gadget, he's using the cloak to sneak up on wild boar and the glove to bonk them on the head. "These magical devices have made me the greatest hunter of all time!" he brags, holding up and flourishing the wild boar's carcass.