Review
Review
Review: Dr Stone
9gwern
2dr_s
5gwern
3ProgramCrafter
3dr_s
1ProgramCrafter
2gwern
2dr_s
6keltan
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At this point, a thought rang aloud in my mind: "why do all the primeval situations end up in a conflict?" I believe the answer in this story is: Senku was reasonably sure that he could beat Tsukasa and then achieve a better world than a compromise, and vice versa. Also, Tsukasa might have had less social priming towards cooperation.
As it happened, I recently watched all of Dr Stone too, and have mixed feelings about it but a lot of my observations are in the same vein.
I think you underplay the extremity of this: Tsukasa's problem is that Senku wins by default in this scenario. As soon as Senku revives a few dozen more people and reveals that the secret is nitric acid produced from bat guano (among many other possible sources), Tsukasa has basically lost. Even if he kills Senku then, there may well be a chemist or someone among the revived, who can easily replicate it. The revival of humanity means Tsukasa will soon be flooded by millions or billions of hostile intelligences; Tsukasa can then no more influence meaningfully the future of the world by punching all those millions of agents than he could in the original contemporary world where he was a successful MMA martial artist. He gets only one shot at controlling the future of humanity.
So a more realistic scenario than what actually happens for narrative shonen reasons, would be something like, Senku is revived after Tsukasa mistakenly thinks he's killed Senku, hikes a week or two away, finds one of Japan's myriad of caves/mountains and bat guano, starts reviving people, and a year later, Tsukasa's hunter-gatherers, venturing afield after a hard winter, discover that there's dozens of settlements of thousands of revived people who are busy reviving more. And then the modern world is irreversibly on the way to a reboot and there is nothing some teenagers dressed up like Fist of the North Star villains can do about it, because they can't revive many people themselves without defeating the whole point. (They'd either revive too few to matter, or wind up reviving their own worst enemies.) It is all-or-nothing. Eventually, even with narrative necessity and endless bad luck, Senku wins completely anyway; Tsukasa loses everything and has to settle for being bought off, in essence, because Senku manages to accumulate enough of a technological advantage even without any additional revivals. (The series unconvincingly says that Tsukasa's politics were superficial and so he got what he really wanted in the end, to try to rationalize how it worked out for him. Seems like cope to me!)
It is, in fact, remarkably similar to nuclear weapons or pandemics or even more so, AI, in terms of how unleashing a particular process almost immediately becomes irreversible, and so the phase immediately before the unleashing becomes all-important (even though it may look completely trivial, and looks like 2 highschoolers bickering over being a tankie and how awful a world with mortgages in it is, or some nerds arguing about speculative physics, or a lab tech sneezing in the street).
Tsukasa loses everything and has to settle for being bought off, in essence, because Senku manages to accumulate enough of a technological advantage even without any additional revivals. (The series unconvincingly says that Tsukasa's politics were superficial and so he got what he really wanted in the end, to try to rationalize how it worked out for him. Seems like cope to me!)
The story plays a bit of a sleight of hand there with Tsukasa having the additional motivation of saving his little sister, which is a pity because they could have at least played up a bit more his conflict with Ryusui (who really seems to stand for everything he hates). But I suppose given his situation, gracefully accepting defeat is reasonably within his personality. He's not insane or bloodthirsty. After realising he's lost, lashing out would only mean humanity risks losing it all, while he can't win any more anyway. Besides his whole cadre has shown itself to be either incompetent or willing to betray him (the amount of people who either switched to Senku's side at the first sign of technology or downright backstabbed him is staggering), so maybe he's just realised his cause never had much of a chance to begin with. He basically never found another idealist like him; he pressganged some people who had no other alternative and found a few thugs who only wanted a chance to be violent assholes. That's not how you build a functional army.
Yeah, it's definitely something of a deus ex machina gimmick. Tsukasa just plain lost and the logical ending is for him to be stoned or killed - but gosh darn it, they just wanted him around too much and to redeem him somehow, so hey! here's this other thing which has not been foreshadowed or meaningfully written into his characterization or worldbuilding, like, at all. I rolled my eyes when I saw that twist coming. Even given the Dr Stone formula of wildly swerving between 'shonen' and 'Robinsonade', it was poorly done.
(Ryusui would've been a better negation of Tsukasa, but would have been tricky to to make that work. If you are at the point his naval skills really matter, the Tsukasa war has to be over already as the exponential cascade should've already long passed irreversibility by the time you have the manpower to build sailing ships rather than, say, a dugout canoe.)
1Tsukasa just plain lost and the logical ending is for him to be stoned or killed
except that
1) there is sometimes too much of such hostility in the real world,
2) some people can legitimately be redeemed - that is, they change thinking strategies and approximations to their values when they see what has been created (re: Einstein's reaction to atomic bomb creation),
3) I don't think anyone depicted in the anime would have valued fairness/consistency/other base for punishing Tsukasa - and with death penalty, no less - over compassion.
Authors might have held the position (shout-out to @the gears to ascension!) "[we] want literally every human to get to go to space often and come back to a clean and cozy world. This currently seems unlikely. Let's change that." Even if they haven't: there is such vibe, and I somewhat endorse it!
Senku definitely holds that position, and of the authors I wouldn't be surprised if Boichi at least did - he is famously a big lover of classic science fiction. If you check out his Dr. Stone: Byakuya solo spinoff manga, it starts out as a simple side story, showing the life of Senku's dad and his astronauts companions in space, and then spirals out in a completely insane direction involving essentially an AI singularity (understandably, it's not canon).
There is a certain "Jump heroes shouldn't kill wantonly" vibe I guess but truth be told Jump heroes have gotten significantly more willing to dirty their hands recently (now Kagurabachi seems set to become the next big thing, and Chihiro has a body count in the dozens at this point). So I don't think editorial fiat explains this either.
It's really part of the manga's fantasy, as in, realistically, sure, Tsukasa would have been killed or kept in stone. But just like everyone is able to make up really complicated fully functioning devices with rudimentary means, everyone is able to reach Aumann Agreement within a relatively short time of being proven wrong. That's just how the world rolls.
There is also an alternative realistic scenario where Tsukasa [temporarily?] wins. That happens if upon killing Senku, Tsukasa buries or destroys his body himself.
Though, to get a scientist not trying to undermine the empire, Tsukasa would need to play Newcomb-like Omega (conditioning reviving the scientist on him cooperating, as any other option qualifies as a ignorable threat). Not getting any science advances would put the tribe on the edge of loss (due to illnesses, Petrification Kingdom, inability to revive people fast enough, inability to anticipate outcomes of any specific revival order, etc).
Yes, while Tsukasa has no particular reason to think Senku could revive himself, he might have done that out of simple guilt/regret. Just one of many reasons that specific plan was very shonen-idiotic. (Your tolerance for Dr Stone's strange blend of oscillating rapidly between shonen-idiocy where everyone is holding idiot balls 24/7 in a world which makes zero sense, and Robinson Crusoe STEM nerd ratfic, will determine how much you enjoy it, I think.)
But even if Tsukasa accidentally deals with Senku in a definitive way, he still has the same basic issue: many people can defect and trigger a civilization-level reboot on their own, and he only has to screw up once. No matter how many 'statues' he destroys locally to prevent revival, and how carefully he selects who to revive, it just doesn't work statistically. (Even handwaving away the wildly absurd worldbuilding which postulates that there can be at least 2 stable villages of hundreds or thousands of humans living at an advanced tech level for 3000+ years without anyone ever recolonizing the rest of the world.) His preferred plan leaves way too much 'hardware overhang'; he needs a singleton, and it's not obvious where he'd ever get that.
(And the worldbuilding further implies that Tsukasa's plan is doomed because Senku is merely the first to wake up due to a double coincidence of location & his mental activity, and all the intact statues would revive eventually worldwide, and neither Tsukasa nor his successors could handle that.)
Not just that, but as per manga spoilers:
The US already have a bunch of revived people going, including a Senku-level rationalist and scientist who has discovered the revival fluid in parallel and is in fact much less inclined to be forgiving and wants the exact opposite of Tsukasa, to take advantage of the hard reset to build a full technocracy. By the time Senku & co arrive there, they already have automatic firearms and WW1-era planes. So essentially Tsukasa's plan was always absolutely doomed. Just like it has happened before, one day backwards isolationist Japan would wake up to find US gunships with superior firepower at its gates and it would be able to do nothing at all to stop them.
I really loved Dr Stone. It gave me the feeling that the science as magic sequences gave me. A deep appreciation for reality and the power it brings an individual to understand it deeply. I really hope to have more rationalists watch it in future.
I also recommend “Science fell in love, so I tried to prove it” for stats nerds. And “My Hero Academia” as the main character embodies “Tsuyoku Naritai!”
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