#anyway for better of for worse i think i’m leaning more on the linear interpretation and the retroactive as subservient to it.

[cacaitos]

overall regarding my last batch of questions, i think on simpler terms, if not talking about the plot itself, ItK is a story about stories, and, just like with characters in-story, how they can fabricate and enthusiasm (or antipathy anyway) for violence and dubious situations lol.

i mean, on a textual literal manner, ichi and kakihara’s fight is just a typical murder scene with unfortunate(?) results. it can easily align on ‘villain so powerful they wish to be defeated’, ‘be careful with what you wish for’, ‘they had it coming’ things of that sort, people arent unreceptive to those stories, specially bc both the characters are horrible people. it’s satisfying to see people you hate die.

on a second level, it is a ‘romance’. yes it can sound redundant due to the oversexual nature of the story. so it’s not so much on the figures but on a practical level, as a tool. much like in hate and revenge, the weak beating the strong or a slighted person enacting justice, romance too requires empathy, if not stright sympathy, for either/or parts, and is no stranger to use hate (conflict) as its driving force. so, catharsis is not achieved, maybe, through conquest, but by the synthesis; the resolution of said conflict (otherwise it’s moreso tragic). 

despite on numbers it’s more appropiate to say that ichi is less worse that kakihara (on an age=experience way) he is wimpy, volatile, undecisive and declares explicitly and loudly he wants to hurt ppl the audience is inclined to feel empathy towards (women bystanders, and not violent yakuza), so he’s underisable, maybe too close to someone you would meet irl. while kakihara hurts the weak, yeah, but it’s violent yakuza like him (and not like you), and instead of contempt he’s moreso *neutral about women, in contrast of ichi’s strong (specially influenced by the fact he’s atraccted specifically to them) opions on them. we spend most of  the time with him, and even by force of shared space and time, one logically understands what he wants. 

so now both for the strength of hate (that you want them both to suffer) and for romance (that you want them both to meet, because one is compelled to the interaction of engaging characters), give way for the third layer of conflict: what’s the correct reaction when the story through legal means has lead you so that this fight happens (standard) but that by asosciation is also leading you to cheering on what’s subtextually, and in a way that’s coherent and directly resulting of the first two elements, an rape scene (or play or whatever). it doesnt negate the entertainment and satisfaction of violence and retribution nor that this is all but verbally what you’ve understood and rooted for kakihara to search and find. i don’t have an answer, to be exact, either.

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the fact that jiji too acts like a puppeteer of his own crafted stories in-story, and we ourselves cannot trust what he says, reminds the reader of the presence of the author. the author has provided the story pure characters: ichi, while being close to beinng the character we know the most about his past of the main 3, has his and our understanding of it disturbed and unreliable in almost every way; we don’t really know why kakihara is so perverted nor why jiji has such a god complex. not like we’ve really needed to know, deliberately; they don’t exist (or at least feel divorced) as characters with a rich internal life beyond what’s necessary for the plot to advance in the limited space of this manipulation, violence and fetish galore story.

jiji, as an internal author avatar, too is the onwer and director of this story, more so than the protagonist (ichi) or the main character (kakihara); he creates the beats and makes the plots and charactes move forward. now where do i want to go with this section, flimsy as it may be. by making more evident the ways a creator will use narrative tools more to the likes of a herding staff, specially the kinds to create strong and divisive emotions i think it’s more convinient to, therefore, analyze this ‘rape’ scene in the practical and utilitarian way it was, just possibly, used for.

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i’ve previously ‘joked’ on how authors will use a woman in a trio to make the two other male characters sublimate emotions (in the neutral way of the word, could mean like could mean murder intent) towards the other through, often hurting her or putting her aside in the process. obviously this is in great part bc of subconscious misogynistic tropes and the likes. nonetheless i will treat it as both subconsious (to some level) and a deliberate exemplification of how those female characters are used just as other intangible narrative tools are.

in that line, then, the internal position of women, real or fictitious, is to further and connect the male-male sociality. be it as validating factors in a competition, like with the twins; suzuki’s family to bribe him into paying for the murderer's fee; jiji using karen to cheer ichi into killing again, and in the process, through phonegirl, validating his outlook on women. this isn't necessarily true of all female characters in the manga, but the last one, on top of manipulating ichi to do his bidding again together with his killing instructions, it also establishes the method through which ichi and kakihara will complete their respective arcs and bring the audience satisfaction.

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now, the problem is to disect whether the way female characters and kakihara (we’re still on the rape plotline for this case) are related is linear or retroactive. if linear, then the women are to be taken as stepping stones that set up the ‘mood’ with which kakihara's and ichi's arc climaxes are to be taken, like the paragraphs state above. if retroactive, then if the author is to assume its demographic, it would use a male character and his probably more closer approach so that their uncomfortablility is then passed more sympathetically to the rest of female characters.

the linear interpretation can look more objective re: the crafting of a narrative: jiji leads ichi to kakihara and the reverse through these series of events and interactions. jiji and the author channel ichi's growing, heterosexual, desire into drawing out kakihara's, through juxtaposition. however this interpretation has a weakness, since there's a gap between how the audience should feel about these women (since it's, for all the flaws of the work, portrayed that's bad they're abused), and how they should feel about kakihara's active desire for that hurt (the part that one is supposed to grow enthusiastic for). how are they supposed to set up the mood if they're so hard to reconcile? how's the audience to respond? or is it just A Fact to take on regardless of the audience reaction, for the sake of the story and story only? on the flipside, if that breach is intentional, is it then that it involves the audience as a Gotcha! in the you don’t want it bc you want it paradox, say, similar to ichi’s conflicted stance on his fetish, or in a sort of *sympathy for kakihara’s? so you wish this fight to happen, but do you endorse its unrelying dynamic too, hm? - prefacing the seoncd one saying i think it can be quite weak, and asume more about a vague reader than the text or its intent itself, since what i intuit this from also lacks enough emphasis it that were to be the case, but alas, moving on. if the interpretation is retroactive, now this is not only addressing the last fight but how kakihara interacts with men through the entire manga. for starters i don't think there's something inherently affeminizing about submission, structural, consensual or nonconsensual (abuse), nor do i think that's the way a good chunk of homosocial relationships of the manga are meant to be read as. but that kind of association is not lost to the manga either, I would argue intentionally, presumably aware of its genre demographic too (seinen, horror). 

kakihara, while doing his fair share of torture as the victimaire, it’s understood this is often a reflection of something he wants done to him (others he’s just a bitch). done to people he lacks respect of (everyone), his underlings, adversaries, etc. his fixation with penile mutilation (of which it’s not like we skip a lot of precisely, for emphasis) is also self reflective. of course on a literal manner this is humilliating (and if taking into a account gendered dynamcis, emasculating). ***as crazy as this may sound, i feel that the violent scenes towards women are oddly, contained? (not like it feels better like that) looking back (and knowing how male authors can be) when they’re about sex, they’re sex; when they’re about violence nudity (or moreso the sexualized framing) is avoided, or at least enough it doesn’t distract from the barbarity. so strangely enough for a manga, this male-directed genital terrorizing (empasized by the shared male perpetrators), in concept, depiction or focus (even if it’s just piercings), appears maybe close in numbers to the previous. even if not so, overall there’s a looming threat of male-targeting violence than usual. so at the moment ichi cuts kakihara’s dick up (ei. it literally ignites his danger instincts, and symbolically castrates him) it materializes the female role of the performance of the victim. how does the presumed audience, the audience of a horror, react to this, closeups and all? weaker, similarly, stronger?

**this is barely revised lol i think towards the end i lost focus but whatever i hope you get what i mean. this is mostly rambles to overexplain lol.

#txt #***I've said it till boredom that im not a fan of that approach bc i feel it's shallow and possibly counterproductive. how original and #humble of them. #like im being more permissive than usual im just tired #anyway for better of for worse i think i’m leaning more on the linear interpretation and the retroactive as subservient to it. #ichi da killa #ichi the killer