#Dordoni Alessandro Del Socaccio | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

littleeyesofpallas · 10 months

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Bleach’s Issue with Queer characters (2/3)

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Dordonii might seem like a weird one to point out here, compared to some of the more overt examples, but I think he had a fairly evident queer codedness to him. His more overwhelming quality was his kind of Spanish flair, what with the tap shoes and Flamenco-esque poses and gestures, the devil horns in his greased hair and on his mask shard, and his little Mephistopheles mustache and beard. But the ear ring, and Flamenco adjacent sex appeal mixed with the way he kind of baby talks Ichigo strikes me as contributing to a certain daddy-ish gay character type. Also, I’ve never been 100% sure that it’s not just crosshatching, but I’ve always read it as some chest hair peaking out from his low v-neck. But I feel like that assessment needs some qualifying context...

Western sensibilities tend to read effeminate features on men as a chief indicator of homosexuality, Japan has never been quite as narrowly focused with its own gay stereotypes. There is definitely a particular character type in anime and manga that pins the preening vanity of smooth faced and long haired effeminate men on homosexuality, but it’s not really the go-to. Tracing back to media trends of the 1970s the long haired, smooth chested pretty boy (even the gay ones) very much became the domain of female audiences and creators, where as the prevailing trends of gay portrayals by and for men actually settled more firmly on the hairy and muscular image that bara is associated with now. I'm not about to do a whole big breakdown of the japanese gay subculture behind the bara thing, because that deserves more time and attentio that i can give it here, but you've got a keyword to work with now, so I encourage you to do a little googling yourself.

Also he has his right ear is pierced? I don't know if this was ever a thing in Japan, but in America it became kind of a wide spread myth(?) Originally it actually was a functioning kind of code within the queer community in the 1960s and 70s, but after it became somewhat more generally well known the practice more or less stopped, for pretty obvious practical reasons... but weirdly enough by the sheer power of stupid homophobia, straight people continued to scrutinize and be paranoid of men with pierced ears for decades following. Again, though, I have no idea if either the original intent or the misinformation of that trend was ever anything that had any kind of Japanese presence...

Anyway... What I’m getting at is Dordonii feels very queer coded to me, just not in ways that everyone picks up on. But speaking of muscular hairy gays... Let’s talk about an elephant in the room:

Charlotte Chuhlhourne:

Obviously, Kubo doesn’t quite have the tact to make use of queer identities in a totally respectful way, so it’s hard to tell how much is attributable to Kubo making a character exactly as they appear, and what could be argued to be a character’s theoretical self-identifying terms filtered through Kubo’s limited vernacular. But the word to know here is Okama[オカマ], which has traditionally referred to gay, AMAB transvestites. Obvious stumbling point here is that prior to more widely codified and accepted trans identities this term applied to both transwoman and drag queens.

Granted until fairly recently(by which I mean within the relatively short spand my own lifetime) even the queer community at large didn’t always differentiate the two very well; presentation was presentation, the circumstances for it and the specificities of achieving it were personal choices, not taxonomical crossroads; some moonlit as queens and that was it, others would’ve lived as women and never walked a show in their life if that had been a practical option, others still were happily gender fluid, but the scene had one look and one label. We made due with what we had.

Anyway... point being that Charlotte’s character is specifically a play into an Okama stereotype. That is to say, the archetypal look of Okama in Japanese media for many years has been a middle aged, square jawed, often broad or even muscular, drag queen. Although Charlotte doesn’t actually have one, they are also frequently shown with a muzzle of stubble growing in. Despite what you might think about jabs at the beard as a masculine feature betraying their feminine presentation, it’s actually not (usually) the reason...

The image comes out of Japan’s gay bar scene --in Tokyo, Shinjuku-Nichoume in particular-- which has long been a cultural centerpiece of Japan’s gay culture. The larger Shinjuku ward as as whole is itself a commercial district. So, to the general public who didn’t have any interaction with gay culture itself, the small glimpse they had was from the crossing paths of salarymen commuting into work as straggler okama headed home from the bars the morning after, still in drag and makeup but with unshaven stubble growing in after a long night.

(Also, just a side note on this, but if you’ve ever seen an older (usually bigger) woman with a deep, brassy voice in kind of sultry night attire at a bar referred to as “Mama,” it’s because that’s the owner of a okama bar. She’s not literally anyone’s mother, she’s the defacto den-mother of sorts for the patrons of her bar.)

It’s still definitely not a flattering portrayal, but it’s one with a very specific history that doesn’t communicate to Western audiences at all. But there is a certain strangeness to how the Japanese handle this, comparatively. While Western rhetoric has its hangups with moralist preaching and bitching and moaning about “degeneracy” and “deviancy,” those judgments just aren’t baked into Japanese culture in quite the same way. In fact, while most of these okama caricatures by and for cishetero creators/audiences are definitely not what anyone would call “good” representation, they do lack a certain expected malice. Sure, flamboyant bafoonery is a constant in exploitation of gay culture on either side of the Pacific, but where as the West uses this as a means to disarm gay men --to make them non threatening, or to rationalize not taking them seriously-- anime manga and even videogames tend to fixate on the curiosity of it.

(although one enduring, generally positive case of this that actually seems to fly super under western audience’s radars are the great fairys in Zelda. which have maintained their extremely obvious dragqueen inspired look since OoT)

One of the first encounters with the okama charactertype that I only learned to identify looooong after the fact is the Magypsies (haha oh boy that localized choice of slur...) in Earthbound. On the one hand they were treated as a bizarre spectacle and literally not human, but they were magical and benevolent and a little comical but not in the way where they were relegated to being the punchline of a joke and nothing else. And I've found over the years that that tends to be the tone of these kinds of characters.

Another very similar case of this is Ivankov in One Piece, the Kamabakka kingdom Okama and Newkama, including Bonclay/Mr.2. (His "okama way" gimmick being a play on the hardboiled gritty actionhero cliche of a "man's way.") Where on the one hand, it’s a disgusting, tacky use of the familiar okama cliches, but also their very existence as okama is painted as the basis of their unique form of super power? Really, it’s just so wildly divorced from reality that it’s hard to even call it “representation,” harmful or otherwise... Still, in impossibly poor taste based on optics alone, though.

This all is not to try and sweep under the rug that these are still ultimately problematic stereotypes and caricatures to have to debrief each new generation of viewer on just to avoid the slippery slope of total misinterpretation, but I've noticed that there is a distinct difference in how that tone is read. The overwhelming attitude I see from these creators is that these long standing cliches are how okama look and act, but that it makes them interesting or funny, and yes “other,” but rarely lesser. Obviously that's still rooted deeply in ignorance on part of these non-queer creators, but you can see how it lacks the teeth that the western equivalent has, where such caricatures are explicitly there to defame and demonize, and I think that’s an important distinction to make.

(And let’s not even get into the issue of fake “woke” white people struggling to wrap their tiny brains around the idea of another culture by framing it as that culture’s unique idiosyncrasies as if they’re just failed attempts at conforming to white anglo-centric western values, because THAT is a whole other can of worms...)

To maybe put this into some better perspective here, Tier Harribel has blond hair and tan skin, and given what the Arrancar are and how they live she is presumably naturally dark skinned, and naturally blonde. But her design is clearly based on gyaru/gal (or possibly ganguro) fashion, which makes use of fake tans and bleached hair. She looks the way she does because she's made to look like that aesthetic, but looking the way she doesn't doesn't imply she bleaches and tans(presumably those colors are both natural on her in-world).

That same relationship of image inspiring image while being divorced from meaning is just kind of how Kubo makes these kinds of aesthetic decisions, all across the board, problematic or not. But of course no one really cares about it when it’s a weird recontextualization of the gal aesthetic because no one’s offended on their behalf.

And in general, I think a lot of these things are just so outside the Western perspective that even when they definitely are problematic, some people can’t even begin to grasp what about it is, and end up fabricating just nonsense arguments against it to rationalize a kneejerk kind of discomfort and confusion over the subject...

Anyway... having said all that, the next one actually IS a huge problem...

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#bleach meta #bleach #KUBO TITE #Dordoni Alessandro Del Socaccio #Charlotte Chuhlhourne #now that its posted #the more i look over this the more i want to edit it #but if i start it'll quickly become just a totally different post #its not even that im looking to correct the basic points being made #so much as i just hate the voice #but then thats always my beef with my own writing #i really hate the way i worded the whole okama bit though #it feels like it doesnt really get the point across #oh well....

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