AndrewA

I'm already in my early 30's, which I suspect is a bit older than the Weekly Shonen Sunday folks have in mind as their core audience.

It is safe to say that the type of instantly applied, instantly removed, practically perfect masks that the Kaito Kid uses is not realistic. However, this is something that gets closer to that level than has previously been normal for theives. http://io9.com/robbers-used-special-effects-masks-to-disguise-themselv-1102528283

In Episode 180-181, "The Nocturne of Red Murderous Intent" there is a cute scene where Conan gives Ran pink flowers, and she is offended because they mean, according to the fansub translations, "Invincibility". The scene had me wondering why she is offended and what flower she was given. I think that what he gave her is a peony. It is a pink flower and wiki lists it as meaning, under the Japanese system, "bravery". I suspect that the fansub translation fails to include all the subtexts to the word translated as "Invincibility". It is also apparently associated with masculinity, which might be why she was offended The Japanese wiki, as imperfectly translated by Google Translate, says it indicates the "Personality of a King". Other sources also refer to it as the king of flowers. The English wiki says that it is associated with bravery and masculinity. So basically Conan was saying she was manly. Can any Japanese speakers/readers shed more light on this? http://dcrewatch.tumblr.com/post/24963985870/detective-conan-rewatch-episode-180-181 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanakotoba http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_of_flowers http://www.thelanguagejournal.com/2012/10/hanakotoba-japanese-secret-language_18.html http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%89%A1%E4%B8%B9

The name changes on the major characters didn't bother me so much at first because I had gotten used to it from the manga translations. However as things went on their attempt to pretend that the stories were in North America became more and more absurd. Ontario? Really? What we really need is partial English dub. I'm fine with Kudo speaking Japanese in a Japanese accent, since he is Japanese. I'm fine with Kudo speaking Engrish in heavily accented Japanese, because that is realistic. However, FBI agents that can't speak proper English is almost as bad as "Ontario Castle". I wish that the American and British characters were dubbed by native speakers of the actual dialects.

Fans of Detective Conan often comment on how the series's high body count doesn't jive with Japan's actual low murder rate, but this real life case reads almost like a plot from the manga. http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/24/world/asia/japan-killings-manhunt/index.html?hpt=hp_bn2

I don't want to come across like I'm trying to do a moderator's job, but wouldn't it be simpler to discuss this one one of this existing threads that covers this topic? http://www.detectiveconanworld.com/forum/topic/921-i-want-ran-haibara-to-be-with-shinichi/ http://www.detectiveconanworld.com/forum/topic/308-whos-better-off-with-shinichi-haibara-ai-or-ran/

I started reading Detective Conan as a natural intersection of several interests. I first read The Roman Mysteries, a series of novels about kid detectives in the Roman Empire, because of my interest in Classical History. That got me hooked on detective fiction, and I started reading other historical fiction mysteries, as well as Golden Age Detective Fiction like Holmes, Poirot, Miss Marple, Lord Peter Wimsey, etc. Now I read all sorts of mystery books. The Roman Mysteries and Harry Potter got me interested in books with kid protagonists. My library carries Negima, which had seen mentioned a lot of TV Tropes and has some superficial similarities to Harry Potter. I have also been a big fantasy fan since I read Tolkien as a kid. That was my first major manga interest. Since my library also carries Case Closed, it made sense to try something that combined my interest in mangas, mysteries, and children's literature.

I'm not sure what you are trying to demonstrate. I've already stated my view on the effect of motivations and remorse on sentences time and time again. There are certain circumstances where homicide is legally justifiable and will not result in criminal charges. I don't know of any DC cases where these circumstances have been applicable, although there might be a few cases I haven't seen yet.

I think is is safe to say that the motivation of the killers will make a difference in what they are charged with and what their sentence is, if for no other reason than it reflects on their character and their potential for rehabilitation. But it won't keep them from a guilty conviction. They are still guilty of something, which is what Kudo wants to get them to acknowledge (and what Gosho wants the audience to learn) by refusing to express anything that sounds accepting their motivations as being actual justifications. I think know who will be a serial killer as early as their infancy is so outside the realm of possibility both in Real Life and in DC that this is not a comparison which is possible to make in this context. I also think that were time travel possible, using it to trying to change the past by killing people before they kill others would be a terrible idea because of the whole Butterfly Effect and Temporal Paradox problems. I'll grant that example, and there are a few others but it is a rare one. I would characterize them as the exception rather than the majority, where you are talking as if these are the majority. I doubt the father in that case will get the max sentence. But under the law, he can't get off completely. Doing so encourages vigilantism and lynch law, which often results in the wrong people being killed. At any rare, Conan didn't do any lecturing in that case. Just laid out the facts and got the confession. A confession where the parent calls his own actions foolish. Then it moved on to the next plot development (Eisuke's confession). Like I said, Gosho rarely has time for a detailed moral After Action Review. But consider also that he was willing to risk others getting blamed for the murder he had done. Consider also the murderers that ended up hurting people that had nothing to do with the offense that had been done against them. EDIT PS: Even in that one example, the father was never able to provide proof that the person he killed was the same one that killed his son. It isn't like the father had been a eye witness and no one else believed him. The person that the father killed might have been a more harmless sort of pervert that was guilty of nothing more than following around school kids and taking pictures. For all we know, the real child killer is still out there.

You are creating a false dichotomy. One can sympathize with being a victim without sympathizing with or justifying murdering because of it. But Conan's role in the story isn't to express sympathy. It is to expose the truth, which will hopefully result in getting the victim to confess. And not just any confession, but the right kind of confession. One that expresses remorse and personal acceptance of responsibility for one's own deeds, not just bitterness at what others have done. If someone does this with convincing sincerity, Japanese culture views the person as a candidate for rehabilitation, not someone to be "discarded like trash by the society AFTER they have done their time." But that is long process and the DC stories don't have time to follow any one case much past the arrest of the criminal.

Do we really know that? How often has the victim said "I tried going to the police and nothing happened." Pretty much never. Gosho is pretty positive about his depiction of the integrity of the police, and even if the police can't solve the crime, there seems to be a surplus of hyper competent private detectives in this setting. Hard to get someone to pay by the law when the police were never made aware until after you murdered them for the alleged offense, and I say "alleged" purposefully because we often only get the murderer's point of view on most of the alleged offenses,see how the victim is no longer around to offer a defense. Gosho has shown that sometimes the murderer is wrong and their victims were in fact innocent of whatever it was that motivated the murderer. Anyway, I see you ignored all the counter example of cases where the murder victim was not in anyway responsible for the death of another person, which is the majority of the cases. You also did not respond to what I said about the cultural connection between invoking remorse and rehabilitation. On the occasions were Conan does in fact lecture someone instead of simply lay out the facts, it is always because the person, instead of showing proper remorse and taking personal responsibility (as the first step to rehabilitation), instead started making excuses. http://books.google.com/books?id=qIHNWWx0ZOIC&pg=PA117&lpg=PA117&dq=japanese+culture+crime+remorse&source=bl&ots=tUXofyH9dd&sig=Lse7s1Z2r3Fpm4KyTtZu1xX8euo&hl=en&sa=X&ei=CFzsUcfDCvje4AOkloD4Ag&ved=0CC8Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=remorse&f=false "The aim to elicit remorse... motivates prosecutors to pursue not merely a confession but the right kind of confession."

For starters, contract killings and robbery killings simply aren't the standard stuff of the tradition of detective fiction that Gosho usually writes in. With the exception of the Black Organization and the occasional robber gang, he doesn't write hard boiled detective fiction full of gangs and mafias and strangers killing strangers or criminals killing criminals. Instead he writes in the tradition of Holmes and Poirot, where murders are generally committed by otherwise normal people who have a personal reason to target the victim. That's simply a genre thing. That really depends on what you did. I mean, taking over someone's business might cause them to commit suicide, but unless you are doing so illegally, it is just competitive business practices. Not equal to murder. If they did do it illegally, go to the police. Don't take the law into your own hands. But ultimately, suicide it the fault of the person that committed the act. I think that the Japanese, or at least Gosho, views taking responsibility for your actions, feeling and expressing true remorse, and accepting the punishment to be the first step to reform. http://japanese.about.com/od/Grammar/a/Expressing-Apologies.htm The Japanese typically apologize far more frequently than Westerners. This probably results from cultural differences between them. Westerners seem reluctant to admit their own failure. Since apologizing means that admitting one's own failure or guilt, it may not be best thing to do if the problem is to be resolved in a court of law. Apologizing is considered a virtue in Japan. Apologies show that a person takes responsibility and avoids blaming others. When one apologizes and shows one's remorse, the Japanese are more willing to forgive. There are much less court cases in Japan compared to the States. I don't press the "multi-quote" button. Instead I use the Quote button in the "Reply to this topic" workspace. The button is between the "Code" button and the Twitter button, and looks like a speech bubble. EDIT PS http://books.google.com/books?id=qIHNWWx0ZOIC&pg=PA117&lpg=PA117&dq=japanese+culture+crime+remorse&source=bl&ots=tUXofyH9dd&sig=Lse7s1Z2r3Fpm4KyTtZu1xX8euo&hl=en&sa=X&ei=CFzsUcfDCvje4AOkloD4Ag&ved=0CC8Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=japanese%20culture%20crime%20remorse&f=false "Discovering the truth, invoking remorse, rehabilitating offenders, treating likes alike, and repairing relations between offenders and victims are more primary to prosecutors in Japan than in America." http://books.google.com/books?id=qIHNWWx0ZOIC&pg=PA117&lpg=PA117&dq=japanese+culture+crime+remorse&source=bl&ots=tUXofyH9dd&sig=Lse7s1Z2r3Fpm4KyTtZu1xX8euo&hl=en&sa=X&ei=CFzsUcfDCvje4AOkloD4Ag&ved=0CC8Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=remorse&f=false "Prosecutors aim to invoke remorse in offenders because they believe that penitence is the essential first step to reform. In their view, rehabilitation requires repentance."

If Kudo visited a prison, it would just result in someone at the prison getting murdered. There is an episode in the Anime (I don't know if it was in the manga) where it is shown that Mouri had some communication with someone he had put away for manslaughter (back when he was a cop), and Mouri meets him when he is released from prison. Except, you know that he doesn't do that all the time. Is someone the scum of the Earth just because they want to name a star after their girlfriend instead of their co-discoverer? Thoughtless perhaps, but hardly a capital crime. Is someone the scum of the Earth because he wants his comedy partner/lover to retire for medical reasons and get married to him, only to have the partner mistake his intentions and kill him the day he was going to propose? Anyway, this has already been answered. It is hard to come up with reasons to kill people that have never offended a soul in their lives. Especially when Gosho has said that he doesn't want to use pyscho killers that kill just for the thrill of it. Except, of course, that this almost never true. Very, very few of the victims had committed capital crimes. In 99.99% of the cases, that victim was either innocent of any crime, or had committed a crime that was not deserving of death, even if you agree with capital punishment, which not all people do. Also, what is the point of lecturing the dead? More often then not, Kudo has already spelled out whatever it is that was done. He doesn't need to say "So and so robbed from him, And That's Terrible." We know it is terrible. There is a benefit of lecturing the living, because the first step to reforming them is getting them to stop making excuses. Also, there are practical concerns. Gosho doesn't have time and space to go into a detailed moral after action review of every case.

The problem with that explanation is that it doesn't really work as far as the idiomatic distinctions that a native speaker of American English would actually make. There is no reason that being child would preclude someone from being called a "guy". Nor, for that matter, is there any reason that a 17 year old high school student (still legally a minor) would not be called a kid by a woman much older than him. In my opinion, Gosho Aoyama made a mistake. Incidently, while on the topic of cringeworthy use of English, I really wish I could get a version of Detective Conan that uses Americans (or Brits as the case may be) to dub all the English dialogue by non-Japanese speakers, but subs all the Japanese dialogue. I mean, you have an American teacher of English that speaks English worse than Hattori.

What precisely are you considering to be an example of "not feeling sorry"? What do you think he should be doing to express "feeling sorry"? I think that Kudo's appreciation of the tragic circumstances of the many murders is there, but it is expressed rather subtlety, in his body language after he finishes his deduction and hears the culprit breaking down in tears. However, he clearly feels that it is necessary to bring murderers to justice, not only for the good of society but also for their own good. He also seems to feel it necessary from time to time to help make the murders clearly understand how horrific and unjustified their acts were. I think he does this for their benefit because their first step towards repentance and reformation is to stop making excuses for your crimes. Also, it is worth noting that Gosho Aoyama is on record in his interviews as saying that he does not want to ever make murder look like an acceptable option. Kudo and the other detectives are lecturing as much for the benefit of the audience (many of them impressionable children) as for the in story characters.

Perhaps I'm misreading you, but you seem to be characterizing the majority of the cases as revenge for murder. I don't think that is the case. The majority are either killing for personal gain or killing in revenge jerkish or unethical behavior that falls well below the level of a capital crime. For example, there have been any number of cases where people killed someone for stealing their ideas, whether it was a professor publishing his student's discoveries as his own, an master selling his apprentices' art as his own, etc. Yeah, the victim was a jerk, but can we really say that plagiarism deserves the death penalty? There has been at least one case I can remember off the top of my head where a husband killed his wife because she was going to leave him and her child. While his version of what she said about not caring for her child for her child might sound pretty harsh, we only have his side of the story, and at any rate, wanting a divorce is hardly a capital crime. A wife is not a husband't possession that he can kill if she displeases him. Also, while it sucks for the kid to have his parents divorced (though many people have grown up reasonably functional and happy in spite of divorced parents) it sucks even more to have his mother be murdered by his father. Also, keep in mind that in almost all these cases, we have only seen the murder's side of the story. We rarely get to see the defense that the victim would have offered against the charges. Even if the murderer has solid evidence that his/her victim was actually guilty of what the murder thinks the victim is guilty of, and if the victim's actions do in fact require punishment, why not go to the police, or to some other authority (such as university officials in the case of the professor plagiarism cases)? We almost never see a murder say that they had already tried going to the police. We also rarely see a case where the murder had already tried using one of the many famous detectives in this universe, such as Mouri, Kudo, Heiji etc., to catch the person they think is a criminal, rather than taking the law into their own hands. Punishing crimes, even murder, is not the responsibility or right of individuals. One person can't be investigator, prosecutor, judge and jury. And what if they got it wrong? Certainly there have been cases where a murderer killed a lover or an ex-lover because they thought the lover hated them, only to find out that this was not the case? Remember the story about the comedy duo that was also lovers? The woman killed the male because the male had been pressuring her to quit comedy because of her bad heart, and he had stated his intention to break up the act with her. She killed him because she thought he had been using her and held her in contempt. In fact he intended to marry her, and wanted her to retire from comedy to be his wife, and to protect her health.

Personally I hope it is an existing character because I think the series is already starting to get a bit overloaded with Super Sleuth characters. Consider also the possibility that the sibling could be a half-brother or step sibling, (either to Sera, Akai or both) which could explain lack of shared family names, allow for a less (or no) family resemeblence, and even allow for having grown up in different areas with different accents

The Internet Movie Firearms Database has a really good article on firearms in Detective Conan. http://www.imfdb.org/wiki/Case_Closed

I'm sure someone has mentioned this before, but in the 13 Red Shirts case, Kir tells Gin that it would have taken superhuman intelligence, like Sherlock Holmes, to anticipate Gin's orders to kill Akai by shooting him in the head, and to plan for a way to fool Gin. That is pretty much screaming that the "Hensei Holmes" plotted the whole thing out with Kir and Akai well before she was even recovered by the BO.

In response to the interview Chekhov posted yesterday: Brilliant! Thanks. So I guess it is now confirmed that Sera has met Ran and Kudo (in some form) before?

I read the manga and watch the anime. It has been awhile, but I'm pretty sure I read the manga first. I get the mangas from my library. I watch the anime online. I like both, but for me the advantage of watching the subbed anime is that the subs usually (but not always) have better translations that the American version of the manga, with its changed names and with all the honorifics dropped most of the time. So far, I do not read the scanlations, which means that story wise I am behind many of you. The only time I looked at a scanlation, it was really poor quality. I would imagine that they are better under the DCTP, but I haven't gotten that far yet. I'm probably going to catch up on all the subbed anime before I worry about scanlations.

I've seen all but three of the episodes of the drama. I've also seen the three live action specials. I agree with previous comments to the effect that it only makes sense if you view it as an alternative continuity. Still, for the most part I really like it. It is certainly the best live action adaptation of a manga/anime that I've ever seen.

Given what we've seen of Kudo when he was Mitsuhiko's age during the flashback episode about little Kudo doing the search based on the code that the old Kaito Kid gave him, I don't think Mitsuhiko is ever going to be as bright as Kudo. This poll is so old that one of my favorite characters isn't even on it: Masumi Sera

Short answer is that it is a mystery fiction thing, not necessarily a Japanese thing. See the TV Tropes links. Anyway, there are exceptions, both in this series and others.

Thanks for those links, Chekhov! Anyway, there have been so many Detective Conan opening songs I like, it is hard to choose.