Series: Snow White with the Red Hair

 Although I intend to focus mostly on Christian entertainment, I don’t want to do so exclusively. For one thing, a lot of Christian entertainment is bad, even painfully bad. Why would I want to watch or listen to or read just that kind of stuff?

In examining good entertainment that doesn’t fit the category of “Christian”, I hope to do a couple of things: keep my own sanity after enduring some of the painful Christian stuff to review, and also to see how some things can simply be done better.

So, enough of all that, let’s get on with it…

This is one of my favorite anime series, as well as manga series (the story in the manga has now gone well past where the anime ended, but I’ll focus here on the anime).

Summary

Shirayuki is a young lady who works as an herbalist. When she receives some unwanted attention because of her hair, she has to flee to a neighboring country. She falls in with a prince of this new country, who treats her with respect and honor. Their friendship grows over time and a few adventures, and finally grows into a romance.

Yes, this is very much a romance story. While it does have some moments of action and fighting, it’s most a slowly unfolding love story.

Why this series?

A lot of Christian movies revolve around marriages, marital strife and restoration. In Daniel’s Lot, for example, perhaps the biggest conflict was between Daniel and his wife Christina. As such, then, it’s good to see examples in stories of good relationships, ones that are models of how a couple should treat each other.

Such examples are precious few.

Snow White with the Red Hair, despite its clunky name translation, is one of those precious few.

Respect and honor

I used those two words in the summary; now, to try to show what I mean.

I’ll start with a contrast, one between Prince Raj, whose unwanted attentions were the reason Shirayuki left her home country, and Prince Zen.

In the first episode, Raj treats Shirayuki as an object, a thing he wants, and what she wants is of no concern to him (if you want a tad bit of a spoiler, he gets better later in the story); Zen, when he meets Shirayuki and learns he can trust her (there first meeting is a bit awkward), sees her as a person, a woman to be protected from Raj’s rather crass attentions.

So, Zen treats her with respect, while Raj doesn’t. It’s a nice and effective contrast.

A few episodes later, Shirayuki is taking a test to become a court herbalist. The test involves overseeing a small green house. The lead court herbalist tells Zen that as a prince all he has to do is say the word, and Shirayuki will be accepted into the job she’s taking the test for.

Zen has seen Shirayuki study and prepare for this test, and knows her well enough to know that she would not want to be accepted into the position if she has not earned the position by passing the test. He honors her and her efforts by not sticking his nose in and trying to influence the outcome.

One of the big ways Zen shows his respect of Shirayuki is a bit subtler. In the first few episodes, Zen is a bit of a slacker when it comes to the paperwork aspects of his position as a prince. He’s someone who wants to be active, not sitting at a desk pouring over one paper after another. He wants to know for himself how the people in his country live, and while that is a good thing, it’s also an excuse he uses to ditch his responsibilities.

But seeing Shirayuki’s efforts causes him to see his own actions in a different way, and to decide to do better. It’s not something that’s made a big deal over, but it’s a nice bit of character development, a way of showing her influence on him, and how he learns from her.

I’m making a lot here of Zen showing honor and respect for Shirayuki, and while I’d say that’s what the story itself shows, it’s also something I want to emphasize. It’s pretty clear early in the series that Zen is the one who is drawn or attracted to Shirayuki in a way that will lead to romantic love. Shirayuki is in a new place, and trying to find her own place in that new place, so while she wants to in some way support Zen in his work and his position, it isn’t until later in the series that she starts taking her own growing feelings into account.

But I think it’s important that Zen showed so much honor and respect to Shirayuki. He respected her. He honored her efforts, and her expertise. He saw her as a person. He saw her as more than just a hair color, or a pretty face, or a beautiful object to be obtained and devoured, or in even crasser ways I’ll not go into here. In the context of this story, this gives her a measure of freedom and security to adjust to a new life, to continue learning and growing, and to prove herself capable.

I know real life is more complicated than any story, but for us guys, this respect and honor is a good place to start.

To try to strengthen this point, here’s another contrast, this time with Daniel’s Lot. One of the big problems between Daniel and Christina early in the movie is that neither one respects the other; quite the contrary, they both blame the other for their current struggling state. One of the movie’s failings is that this lack of respect is not really dealt with. Daniel gives a kind of general apology at one point toward the end, but that’s it. Even though the movie tries to end with them being together again, I don’t see much reason to hope. Daniel acts better because his circumstances are better, but if things go bad again, I saw no reason to think he wouldn’t act just the same way he had before; if anything, he may act worse, because now he thinks God is always on his side no matter what, he’s the one whose faith (or what the movie tried to portray as faith) was proven right, he’s the spiritual giant that God rewarded. If things go wrong again, it won’t be his fault.

To put it another way, I saw no reason to think that Daniel had any more respect and honor for Christina at the end of the movie than he did at the beginning.

Conclusion

A couple of years ago, I wrote a longer article for this series, and Beneath the Tangles accepted it and posted it on their side. You can find it here. 

Like I said at the first, Snow White with the Red Hair is a favorite of mine, and one I recommend strongly.