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littleeyesofpallas · 1 year

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

So then there’s Giselle (and to a less canon extent Shutara) who I think Kubo erroneously categorizes as similar to both eachother and to the above gay men stereotypes. And I think understanding Kubo’s approach to Giselle hinges on what he set up (but didn’t follow through on) with Shutara.

I’ve mentioned before, but I’m pretty certain think Shutara Senjumaru is meant to be a kabuki onnagata*. Not in-world, mind you; I don’t think she is somehow employed as an actor in a literal kabuki theater. (i would hope that was obvious, but one can never be too sure...) Just like Tier Harribel isn’t literally a light skinned, dark haired person doing gyaru/ganguro fashion, her presumably naturally tan skin and blonde hair is based on the general aesthetic. Shutara likewise is channeling distinct look and feel that draws from a mix of oiran, geisha, and kabuki aesthetics. (granted all three are closely related in influencing one another’s aesthetics in the first place)

But while the look and even the demeanor tend to play all three ways, I think the particular fixation on clothes, costuming, and the somewhat adjacent theme of “disguise” that Kubo has shown to put emphasis on in this kinds of situations, as well as the fact that he gave her a distinctly masculine name, Senjuumaru, point to her being some form of queer, albeit something Kubo seems to pretty clearly lack the understanding to better articulate himself. Is she a trans woman? Gender fluid? A male identifying transvestite? There’s not enough real material for us to draw that particular line, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to conclude that she’s not a cis woman.

*Kabuki is traditionally an all-male theater form, and “onnagata” refers to actors who specialize in playing women roles. Generally all actors train in the delineated masculine and feminine styles, but an actor’s career sticks to just one or the other...

...There is a whole big thing about how cultural institutions like kabuki and takarazuka theaters’ creation of socially acceptable and even celebrated, public and professional genderqueer spaces creates a myriad of gender dynamics that just don’t exist in the West, and it’s something that has made the attempt to adopt a globalized understanding of queer identity a little trickier in Japan:

In the West the gender binary was rigidly enforced such that to explore alternatives was basically uncharted territory (that’s an oversimplification, but you know what I mean; There’s a lack of contiguity with those who came before) but with japan there were already nonbinary spaces in place, and the lines around those don’t neatly line up with the ethnocentric western ideas some people try to pigeonhole those into. In general, it gets dangerously close to just flat up colonizer rhetoric.

(forgive the outdated reference image, but honestly I don’t know what even counts as a recognizable example of a “““trap”” character these days. And I use that term with GREAT reluctance, but I want to differentiate the exploitative cliche usage of a trans caricature from any actual representational trans character.)

Anyway... That all just leaves Giselle. And let’s be real, there’s no excuse for this one. Maybe that seems like a weird anticlimactic place to take this series of posts... like, after all this, maybe it feels like I should’ve had some equally obtuse logic to explain this one away as a matter of escalation or as a Rule of Threes. But no, not really. I just think it’s a little unreasonable to treat the massive screwup that was Giselle’s portrayal as part of some sort of bigger ongoing trend, when it’s really more of an unrelated outlier in a bigger umbrella subject.

She is in fact a bad case of the long standing anime/manga fetishization of transwomen as a concept, as a spectacle to be gawked at and made the butt of jokes or to be included specifically as an anomaly. And in Giselle’s case her specific depiction as a depraved, physically/sexually abusive villain on top of that is an explicitly toxic combination.

In spite of that, I still don’t think Kubo actually meant for it to reflect poorly (not that that matters or diminishes its harmfulness) I think he genuinely just has no real grasp of what that kind of characterization means. I say that largely because of the way he treats a lot of her role in the plot. Not that she’s integral to moving it forward, but that she occupies space and survives in the plot as long as she does, even when she could've been conveniently (and frankly more neatly) written out;

He seems to like drawing her and gives her a range of expressions and gestures (something he doesn't afford all his characters, even some of his major ones)

He likes to expand on her powers and gimmicks beyond what was necessary if he'd been aiming for minimum effort

He even paired her off against his personal favorite character, Mayuri.

Point being, Kubo seems to personally like Giselle as a character, but he took a horrible insensitive and ignorant path in writing her character.

But an undeniable fact is, she’s not alone as this kind of villain, she’s just the only one that happens to be trans.* Mayuri himself, Aaroniero, Szayelaporro, Zomarri (just a little bit), Tousen (at the very end), Tsukishima, As Nodt, Gremmy (a little), and Askin all to some degree dip into this shtick Kubo does where his villains aren’t just sadistic but ecstatically so, to the point of intoxicated, gleeful derangement. Yet in spite of that, those characters are all usually meant to be “cool,” not detestable.

Remember, Mayuri was initially written as, hands down, the most despicable characters in Bleach —he was abusive and sadistic, misogynistic, actually physically grotesque, predatory, dishonorable sneaky & underhanded, complicit in a genocide, just in general a clearly communicated mad scientist villain, and he was all of this in direct and deliberate contrast to Uryuu’s chivalrous personality type(already established in his defending Orihime from Jiroubou) as well as Nemu’s noble stoic subservient victimhood— and yet he’s also Kubo’s favorite character in the series. Kubo doesn’t actually write Giselle any particularly worse than the others, BUT he also doesn’t disassociate her being trans from her being villainous, and again, even incidentally, that manages to perpetuate a harmful narrative in the overall.

*(Actually, I’ve kinda touched on it before but I sort of suspect Mayuri could be trans, in which case; OOPS, that makes two, and that doesn’t make it better....)

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#bleach #bleach meta #KUBO TITE #senjumaru shutara #giselle gewelle #geez this thing is so old that bridget wasn't even reintroduced to guilty gear yet #in fact strIVe wasn't even a thing on the horizon this far back #also weird that preupdate drafts still adhere to outdated formatting #because typing these tags now and editing these drafts #is working on weird janky tumblr formats that i kind of forgot existed #anyway like i already said in the tags of part 2 #im kind of super not satisfied with the wording on a lot of this #feels muddled #and i think i sort of lost track of the root of things #where someone was calling kubo ''obviously'' transphobic #and i think that's not entirely accurate #even if the bottom line almost doesnt make any difference #but there's a difference between ignorance and insensitive #and just outright malice #but the former is very much fixable and even reclaimable #the latter is absolutely not #again tho i get why to a lot of people that doesn't really make a difference #even this far out i dunno how i thought i was gonna end this #or how id do it any differently if i tried now

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humming-fly · 10 months

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every year for my birthday I do something self-indulgent and THIS year it's me finally organizing all the doodles and lore for my kirby oc Fayre that I have yet to put on tumblr into one place!

because i love you all putting the vast majority of this under a readmore but yeah if you want a collection of doodles and vaguely coherent scraps of info about my little guy please read on and if you want to ask questions about 'em go for it i love talking about these idiots

gonna also be mentioning a few other OC's here so for the record Strix belongs to @alagaesia-overlord and Stell belongs to @aseuki, because everyone knows it's more fun being insane about something if you have company~

real quick gonna just link to the past main posts on fayre for posterity lol

Fayre Details/Backstory:

So as has already been established in prior posts fayre is a very fae-aligned little critter that pretty exclusively hangs out in the woods with their 1-way mirror mask behaving for all intents of the word like some sort of weird cryptid. In terms of defining characteristics they have a set of very odd wings that constantly emit a stunning aura that causes confusion/distress when observed at close quarters, as well as a permanent 0.0 expression that they can't change (so no blinking, smiling, etc.) which is a byproduct of their creation as a mirror clone.

How all that worked out is their 'original', Prism, landed right next to a mirror portal as a newborn and more or less immediately wandered into it - my general headcanon about how the mirror doubles work is that they're made up of Every reflection someone has made up to the point they look into the amazing mirror, but since prism only just existed her first and only reflection was the 0.0 expression of a child looking through the mirror before passing through it, so fayre is locked and loaded with that expression but nothin' else. This is also why fayre's wings are way different than prism's bird-of-paradise setup, as technically prism's back was never reflected by the mirror either so it got the randomizer setting instead.

Despite being 'born' more or less at the same time the two never formally met until many years later, as prism wandered right into the mirror world and fayre wandered right out into the primary world and neither ever looked back. Differences aside, when prism did eventually track fayre down they immediately hit it off and now consider each other to be twin siblings. (Prior to meeting Prism Fayre didn't know they were a mirror clone, but largely took learning that detail in stride, as they do with most things)

In terms of early life fayre was actually found and raised by a small village of broom hatters, who came upon this child in a little crater they'd made after falling off the cloud holding up the mirror

The broom hatters assumed that fall was what had paralyzed their face, but fortunately as the broom hatters are a race of faceless creatures themselves the lack of expressions wasn't ever a problem. Not being able to move or open their mouth means fayre can't talk with it, but instead uses the general telepathic way of speaking used by most species lacking that particular facial feature. The main benefit of that skill is being able to throw their voice and also talk in hieroglyphics if desired

Fayre stayed with the broom hatters until reaching early adolescence, after which they left to go explore the natural world - though now living on their own they do still come back to say Hi every year or so during the Sweeping Seasons.

Fayre got their wings sometime while off living by themselves in the woods, and after some trial and error did figure out a way to more or less 'replace' their wings with a funky cape (the trial and error being a learning curve whereupon getting near people with their wings would cause people to get dizzy/sick, so for a while they were wandering around in a little cape they found until they could puzzle out a way to properly tuck them away) - while the cape is replacing the wings they're more or less 'in stasis', so damaging the cape doesn't damage the wings and vice versa, and is more of a strange pocket dimensional swap than anything. Thus the cape can't actually be removed from fayre, trying to rip it off them won't hurt or anything but will probably just yank them around a bit (maybe they're somehow trading their wings with an equivalent in the yarn dimension? who knows, they certainly don't)

The wings themselves are pretty odd as they look sort of like dragonfly wings but are actually made up of individual feathers of varying traits - general consensus is they are indeed very pretty, but other than gliding fayre can't actually fly that well with them. The stunning aura on them Does keep bugs and wildlife away though making them ideal for forest exploration, and fayre will wrap themselves up in them every night when going to bed as the wings work to deter any predators from going after them, and it's Comfy

~Plot Stuff Begins~

Meeting Strix:

For quite a while Prism was the only consistent point of contact Fayre had with anyone else, and even then the two only visited one another infrequently, both happy to largely keep to the homes and lives they've carved out for themselves.

The first major change to fayre's day to day life was the introduction of another puffball named Strix, who happened upon them while looking for their wayward coworker

After conversing a bit it was discovered that Strix is actually employed as a Reaper, of the paper-pushing variety, and only tends to poke their head out of purgatory when hunting down their work-shirking coworker.

Said work-shirking coworker is also the reason strix is the only person fayre has met that isn't affected by their wing's wonky aura - spending a few centuries in close quarters with someone who puts out a very similar status effect tends to build up an immunity, which fayre tries their best to take full advantage of

Fayre and Strix managed to hit it off early on, and occasionally meet up every month or so for an hour or two to get their required socializations in before wandering back off from whence they came. Strix will often share their work bereavements, or encourage fayre to actually learn some self-defense, which is largely met with playful ambivalence, though despite fayre's general disinterest in combat some minor progress was made on strix's part

(To that end farther the line a more favorable and not at all ominous deal was struck between the two so time will tell how that pans out)

During one of these chats strix also shared some of their Tragic Backstory:tm:, which fayre empathized with in the only way they know how

These friendly meetings continued with regularity for some odd years, up until fayre accidentally rode-along on one of strix's business calls~

Meeting Stell (aka The 'Among-Us' Arc):

Unfortunately for Fayre, Strix had been called to investigate what was reported to be an erroneous wish caused by a faulty comet, one without its proper safety regulations in place. Fayre tumbled on through strix's portal and into the sidelines of an ongoing fight between strix and some new armored fighter apparently affiliated with said comet.

Hoping to avoid whatever anime-ass conflict was going on over there, fayre started drifting towards the only other point in space of any note, the giant cat-like mechanical comet. Unfortunately for fayre, whoever had maintained that comet had rigged it up with a series of perimeter defenses, which fayre became intimately familiar with as they were shot down and forced to land on the comet itself to escape the bullet-hell firing at them.

Suffering some fun knicks and scrapes predominantly on their wings fayre pushed that on the back burner with their cape and started to look for an exit from this weird mechanical death trap. (Past this point Fayre has a quasi-permanent notch in their left feather).

Thus began fayre's fun-filled two-ish weeks of impromptu among us where they had a jolly time hiding in the vents and cutting wires to stall the maniac doing their level best to eject them with lethal force

Eventually contact was made with the assailant, whose name was apparently Stell, and an agreement was brokered just as Strix finally decided to stop by again to see how fixing that busted-ass comet was going.

after that misunderstanding was cleared up Fayre finally got off that shitty comet and after being dropped off in the woods by strix managed to trudge all the way to the mirror dimension to visit prism and get some bandaids (slash bullet holes patched up)

Mirror Arc & Beyond:

Some additional fun is had with the twins in the mirror dimension, namely the whole kitten kaboodle becoming corrupted for a time and fayre becoming a bit of an asshole because of it, which predominantly ended up aimed at strix who popped by to help sort all that out

post-corruption fayre found out apparently strix took the verbal abuse personally and fixed that all right up in their own way by visiting them at their workplace

tragically for fayre's happy-go-lucky attitude they've come to be attached to strix, which only became obvious once strix relayed a recent near-death experience to them and they got to experience their first ever Bummer Emotion

making that extra fun was learning said near-death experience was caused by their good friend Stell, which in turn lead to fayre's first ever Catching Hands Emotion

fayre's emotional roller coaster topped out after more or less jumping stell in a convenience store and trying to forcibly shove their own negative emotions down his throat after he brushed off the encounter he'd had with strix (partially due to running a high fever but that sure wasn't fayre's problem) - since then they've leveled back out and are back to being the most emotionally well-balanced of the three, which is a low bar to clear but hey first place is still first place~

#why yes this Is a birthday gift to myself #internet backups are important and also fun to find down the line hahaha #anyways hope you all enjoy my Special Little Guy #also tw for flashing image way at the bottom of this massive post #long post #like for real it's a Long post i used the full 30 images #fayre #kirby oc #ahh #my art #doodles

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