#feminist literary analysis

[yggdraseed]

Women in Jujutsu Kaisen

Let’s get this out of the way first: if you’re reading this because you enjoy reading posts by people who hate Jujutsu Kaisen, you’re going to be disappointed. I actually like Jujutsu Kaisen a lot, I have a lot of positive things to say about it, and I’m going to be explaining my reasoning here. You should probably move on if you want trash talk. But if you have a negative view point that you’re nevertheless willing to reevaluate or recontextualize by looking at things from a new perspective, please read on.

A lot has been said about how women are written in Jujutsu Kaisen. A lot of good, and a lot of bad. I think a lot of the bad comes from how Jujutsu Kaisen was praised so early on for how it’s women were written, only for people to either not see it or have their expectations not be met due to events in Shibuya and the Culling Games. However, while I try to respect diversity of opinion, I feel like a lot of people aren’t really grasping why the way GeGe Akutami writes women was lauded. I think a people have lots of different ideas of what makes for a well-written female character, and don’t find what they’re looking for in Jujutsu Kaisen, thus they get angry and they post online about how GeGe Akutamisogyny isn’t going to beat “the allegations.”

I’ve never liked the justifications put forth for that argument. There’s a lot of subtext to how the female cast of Jujutsu Kaisen are written that can’t fit neatly into the simple world of page and panel counts or win-loss ratios. And, fortunately, there are tools for feminist literary analysis that I am going to employ in what will hopefully be a short trilogy of posts, starting here.

When I see people criticizing how women are written in Jujutsu Kaisen, I usually only see them using one point of interest: the outcome of a fight. If a female character doesn’t win a fight, then some people in the audience take that to mean that GeGe Akutami hates that character, hates women, and doesn’t want them to succeed — or some variation of that, perhaps less extreme.

This is a product of Jujutsu Kaisen being a Shonen, and thus being on the radar of Shonen fans who — let’s be honest — are not known widely for consuming anime or manga outside of the Shonen demographic. Shonen is heavily focused on conflict and competition as storytelling, it’s why the term “battle shonen” is used so prevalently. And Jujutsu Kaisen doesn’t try to deny its own Shonen heritage: it uses fights for storytelling all the time, sometimes even more than other Shonen seem to do.

I think this might also be a cultural thing. Anime and manga are written very differently from Western movies or comic books, with very different cultural background and different artistic sensibilities. However, that’s a topic that I’ll unpack another time, maybe not even in Part 2 or 3 of this post.

Point is, we need to step back and get some perspective. People who use the losses or deaths among the female cast as evidence that GeGe hates women, or sees women as inferior, or has some sort of passive, culturally-inherited sexism in their worldview are suffering from tunnel vision. You need to look at the story as a whole sometimes, not just the one subject in question.

Go back to the Goodwill Event, and the fight between Nobara and Momo. Their whole conversation is a huge part of why Jujutsu Kaisen was praised early on for how Akutami writes women, and I think the subtext of it really went over some people’s heads. It did mine, the first time around: to me, it just felt like a competent, if tired “girl power” moment for Nobara. But as I invested more time and thought into reading the series, and as I learned more since first viewing that scene, I started to realize what I wasn’t seeing in that scene.

Momo shares something in common with all of the Kyoto Students, Todo and Miwa being the exception. In addition to seemingly coming from a more-or-less established sorcerer pedigree, Momo shares the general pessimism that hangs over the Kyoto Students like a dark cloud. There’s this very morosely Japanese sense of “woe is me, but there’s nothing to be done” about Momo, Mai, Noritoshi, and Mechamaru, in one sense or another. These four are people who will complain about a problem, then just sit while it washes over them and batters them like a wave. They just accept the unfair hand they’re dealt in life, and while they don’t like it, they treat it as something no one can overcome. Furthermore, on some level, I think these four don’t necessarily want to overcome the misfortunes and injustices they face.

See, Momo pours her heart out at length about how hard it is being a woman and being a sorcerer. And the way she talks about it is a very different critique of society than you’d see in a lot of Shonen. She talks about how women are expected to be perfect: beautiful, graceful, exquisite, the model of femininity, while also keeping up with the macho “might makes right” sensibilities that dominate sorcery. In her words, “men have to be strong, women have to be perfect.”

This isn’t something that’s just being plucked out of thin air, this is a criticism of the girlboss culture that arose through the 2000s and 2010s up to now. Women are expected to battle sexism alone, in their own lives, by being exceptional: rather than reforming cultural structures that put women at a disadvantage to men, girlboss culture says women just need to always wear perfect makeup, always be fashionable, always work 2.5 times harder than men, and find time to raise children and have a side-hustle at the same time. Instead of fixing the problem, it’s telling women, “Just work harder. Just be better.” As if women haven’t been having to work harder for nothing in return for the past 50 years, holding down jobs that they have to go above and beyond to prove themselves in as compared to male coworkers for whom the job might as well be a guarantee by comparison, having a ceiling put on their promotion while men who didn’t put in as much work get to move up the company ladder, and frequently having to juggle having a child and taking care of housework in addition to the expectations of jobs that often don’t afford maternity leave. And then, on top of all of that, the expectation is then foisted on to have the time and energy to perfectly craft your hair, makeup, and outfit for the day, and if you miss a single step of the whole stupid dance, you’re seen as an underachiever. That’s girlboss culture, and that’s what Momo is indirectly criticizing when she laments the contradictory and unfair expectations women in the sorcery world have to uphold. They need to fight just as hard as the men, while wearing skirts and not getting a single scar on that pretty face.

(Just as an aside, I love the way this conversation comes about. Momo and Mai are pretty close to each other, to the point that it sometimes feels like nobody else in the Kyoto school likes or respects Mai like Momo does. And Momo targets Nobara with this whole speech because of the friction between Mai and Nobara, and because she wants to stand up for Mai. I like that element of both solidarity and conflict between women, about being a woman, and I’ve always gotten sapphic vibes from Momo and Mai, so I’m glad that she’s the one giving this whole speech and why she’s doing it. But I digress.)

And the thing is, she’s not wrong. Neither Nobara nor the story as an overall entity refutes anything she says. However, Nobara points out something else about Momo that she shares in common with the other Kyoto Students who were raised to be sorcerers: the way she treats her whole life like a job. Momo has internalized the culture she despises, and instead of trying to rebel, she just accepts all of it as “the way the world works.” She soldiers on, just as Noritoshi soldiers on with his family’s expectations, Mai soldiers on with her pain and feeling of being abanoned, and Mechamaru soldiers on with the isolation, unfairness, and general misery that comes with his Heavenly Pact. Soldiering on, as if soldiering on has inherent value when it leads nowhere and accomplishes nothing. Never addressing the problem, or trying to find a way around it; simply rolling that boulder up the hill, grumbling all the way. She and the other Kyoto Students have this sense of treating their own misfortune as a badge of honor. To them, they’re justified and validated because they have experienced more than their fair share of suffering. They’re always eager to flaunt the crosses they have to bear.

Momo treats being a woman as a curse. Funny how that ties into the rest of the narrative, huh?

For Nobara, being a woman is not some great burden she has to live with. Being a woman in general and being Nobara Kugisaki in particular is something she revels in, and it’s just the fault of everyone else if they think otherwise.

Let’s talk about Nobara, and let’s not reduce her to her death scene. When we meet Nobara, she’s immersing herself in the Tokyo way of life after moving from the countryside to the big city. She encounters a sleazy talent agency recruiter who’s pestering women on the street with his hand-rubbing, obviously nefarious ways… only for Nobara to stop him, turn him around, and say, “What about me?” He gets intimidated, tries to run, and she drags him back. From her perspective, he should be happy to have her, and the fact he isn’t means he’s ignorant of her beauty and wit and needs to be corrected. If he won’t convert to Kugisakism, then her charms are wasted on him, and he’s doomed to the dim world that is Nobaralessness. When she meets Yuji and Megumi, she introduces herself with a line that’s translated into English as, “I’m the only woman in your group.” But from what I’ve been able to gather, her line in Japanese is, “I’m the red mark.” The phrase “red mark” can mean “the one who’s different from the others” — like the one girl in a group of boys — or it can mean “the one who stands out.” So you can also read it as her saying, “I’m the stand-out of the group.” Nobara Kugisaki, everybody.

If you want to talk about how literary circles analyze how women are writing, let’s leave the topics of fight outcomes and feats to one side. One thing you immediately look for is motivation. What’s motivating a character? This is important for how female characters are written, and especially in Shonen, which revolves so much around characters with some goal or belief that the story pursues through fights and other forms of adversity.

Now poorly-written women will tend to be motivated by men. They’ll be attracted to a man, or trying to support or protect a man, or trying to find a man. This by itself isn’t a death sentence for a woman’s characterization, but it is a red flag. It’s also not as if women have to never interact with or think about men to be well-written. It’s not an on-off switch, a bad writing-good writing switch. It’s a meter, like Mahoraga steadily adapting to a technique. Just a little bit is fine, and can be even turned into good writing in capable hands. But if it becomes too prevalent and is never examined, then you get a situation where a story’s women are not permitted lives outside of being in a male character’s orbit.

How do we gauge this? Well, there are lots of ways, but one of the more well-known and simple techniques is the Bechdel test. The name is derived from Alison Bechdel, feminist author who penned such classics as Dykes to Watch Out For. Bechdel proposed a simple litmus test for how to tell an author’s seriousness about writing women, and it goes like this: 1.) Look for scenes where women talk to each other. 2.) In those scenes, check for how often they’re talking about things besides male characters.

This isn’t the only way to tell if women are written well or not, and some will say it isn’t even the best way, but it’s a good foot in the door to get us thinking about what divides well-written female characters from poorly-written female characters. I’m not going to go back and scan through the whole manga just yet, but let’s look at some examples.

— The aforementioned conversation between Nobara and Momo, where the two pit their different view of what it means to be a woman and a sorcerer against one another. — Maki and Nobara talking to each other after the encounter with Mai and Todo. Curious by meeting Maki’s sister, Nobara talks to Maki a bit about their upbringing. Having gained more insights into Maki’s past and personality, Nobara leans on her and tells her how much she respects her. — Miwa and Mai discussing the upcoming Goodwill Event in a flashback. Mai tells Miwa that Maki is weak, which leaves Miwa unprepared for their fight. — Maki and Mai arguing and coming to terms with what drove them apart. Mai just wanted a peaceful life with Maki, but Maki couldn’t be happy and authentic with herself if she just left things the way they were. She was forced to choose between herself and Mai, and Maki chose herself, knowing that Mai would suffer and that she’d shoulder some of the guilt for that.

This indicates that GeGe found it important to divorce the identities of the female characters from male characters. And this holds true in what drives and motivates the female cast.

Nobara is motivated by her own goals. She hates the countryside, and she loves the city; becoming a sorcerer is a way she can make a lot of money, live in the city, and pursue the kind of lifestyle she values. She wants to be a true blue Tokyoite, wearing trendy clothes and eating crepes and taking selfies by the statue of Hachiko outside Shibuya Station. She’s not doing this to avenge her dead brother, she’s not doing this to find her father, she’s not searching for a strong man to sire strong children — yuck. Nobara has aesthetic values and strongly held beliefs, and becoming a sorcerer lets her pursue those values and beliefs.

And if you really want to analyze the action side of Jujutsu Kaisen as an indicator for how GeGe feels about female characters, consider how Nobara takes to sorcery like a fish to water. Both Megumi and Yuji have their own internal dilemmas with being a sorcerer, but not Nobara. In a series where mindset is so important, Nobara has the mindset. Uro describes the model sorcerer as having “no concern for others and an overwhelming sense of self.” There is no one with a more overwhelming sense of self than Nobara. She’s loud, opinionated, loves to argue, flaunts herself, and demands other people give her more than what they think she’s due. She’s narcissistic, but that faith in herself makes her mentally strong.

She lacks experience, but even then, she learns and grows rapidly through the series. Due to running out of nails to fend off cursed spirits during the first stretch of Fearsome Womb chapters, she invents Hairpin as a way to reuse nails she’s already launched and embedded in a surface. She manages to land a Black Flash during the tag team fight with Yuji, and it’s her oppressive use of Resonance on Eso and Kechizu that turns the tides — a tactic which required her to hammer nails into her own arm. She takes it on the chin and gets her brain rattled around in her skull during the fight with Haruta, but even while borderline unconscious and suffering from a concussion, she forces herself to keep him talking in hopes Nitta can escape and manages to get to her feet and keep fighting despite the total disorientation and inability to summon her strength. While she didn’t win the fight, she showed more fighting spirit than half of the male cast tends to, and I find it kind of gross that people will ignore all of that and mock someone who kept fighting against the odds. That’s like laughing at Mumen Rider when he’s hopelessly trying to fight Sea King even as his body is breaking. I don’t exactly see what about either case is so funny or worthy of ridicule.

Even in the showdown with Mahito, people always fixate on how she dies, but never consider what led to it. She crosses paths with Mahito, and even knowing from Yuji what he’s capable of, she goes in — partially because he hurt Yuji, her friend, and she wants to make him suffer for it. And her technique turns out to be a worst case scenario for Mahito. She’s hammering his clone with Resonance and sending the blowback to the original while he’s fighting Yuji, dividing his attention and weakening him. Her only mistake was chasing him down, and even then, this isn’t the story punishing her. It’s the story being consistent with who Nobara is. She’s got a dangerous enemy on the ropes, her pride is bruised after the fight with Haruta, and she has a chance to get vengeance on someone who’s hurt her friend while helping said friend in the process. If she hadn’t followed Mahito into the subway, then she wouldn’t be Nobara Kugisaki.

And in her final moments, Nobara achieves something that’s considered to be out of reach of most sorcerers. She dies content, with a smile on her face. Nobara may not have realized her potential to be a great sorcerer, but she got what she, personally, wanted. Sorcery was a means to an end, and she got to live the Tokyo life and meet interesting people that she considers her friends. She got to fill out that finite number of seats in her life, and even meet a few people who pulled up a chair when she didn’t expect it. In her words, “It wasn’t so bad.” Nobody else but Toji and Gojo have gotten to die this satisfied — Toji because Megumi had grown up free of the Zen’in curse, Gojo because he was authentic to himself right to the end and left it all on the field. Nobara was authentic to herself right to the end, and that’s worthy of high praise. If she is definitely dead and not coming back, then she managed to accomplish what it was she wanted before dying. Not many get that luxury in Jujutsu Kaisen. It hurts because I liked her and admired her and appreciate the way she was written, and her dying doesn’t make the value of her character disappear from the story entirely. It’s the character’s death, it’s everything that led to that death and what that death means to them and to those who are left behind. And if it’s manga that explore death, nobody does it better than GeGe Akutami.

Lots of people will point to an interview where GeGe said that Nobara was not originally considered part of the cast, and they’ll use that as evidence that secretly, GeGe’s a big stupid misogynist who hates women and likes killing them in stories and blah blah blah blah blah. You know, first of all, I doubt that the editor held a gun to GeGe’s head and said “Put in a female main character or die.” Secondly, if GeGe really didn’t care, Nobara would just be a two-dimensional copy of Sakura who dies in the first arc or two. GeGe would not have put in the effort to set her apart from other female leads, or given her so many stand-out moments, or given her such an interesting motivation and world view. In short, if GeGe didn’t want to write a female character, they’d do what Kishimoto did: write Sakura. But that comparison is a can of worms I’ll need to pry open another time.

To sum up for the time being, no, GeGe Akutami does not hate women. Losing a fight does not make a female character worthless, and does not indicate a disdain for them on the part of the author. I don’t know about you, but I don’t read Shonen just to see who punches harder. I want to see characters be challenged, sometimes fail, learn, grow, and overcome adversity — and it wouldn’t be adversity if all the characters I like win and survive easily. I love Kashimo and will continue to love Kashimo, and Kashimo being super ultra dead doesn’t change that.

Look out for Part 2, in which I’m going to unpack some really contentious stuff when it comes to challenges and female characters in Jujutsu Kaisen. We’re gonna talk about the concept of screen time, we’re gonna talk about subtext, we’re gonna talk about great expectations and the great unexpected in Jujutsu Kaisen, and we’re gonna talk more in-depth about the narrative outside the narrative of Jujutsu Kaisen in a vacuum. If your sense for danger is giving you a bad feeling about this, then it should be: we’re talking about that. Switch on your Anti-Gravity System, it’s going to get messy.

#jujutsu kaisen #literary analysis #analysis #jjk analysis #feminism #feminist literature #feminist literary analysis #nobara kugisaki #maki zenin #akutami gege

[radfembri]

forgot my professor identified as nonbinary and i turned in a paper with a whole paragraph on how anne fausto-sterling’s intersex “research” was debunked 22 years ago :P

#can’t wait to see my grade on that… #sometimes i just forget i live in an uber liberal area and questioning gender identity is treated like a war crime #it was relevant at least—i was writing a response to a chapter in our literary analysis textbook on feminist critique and that chapter #devolved into a ‘gender theory’ chapter (even though there’s another chapter in the book on ‘q***r theory’) #the author quoted that bunk study by afs and this edition came out 13 years after it had been debunked #so there’s literally no reason it was included as if it meant anything

[yellowspiralbound]

Personal Breakdown of Swan Upon Leda, Stanza by Stanza

Disclaimer: this analysis is entirely personal opinion. If you have a different interpretation that's great! In fact, I'd love to hear your interpretations of the song. Anyway, analysis time:

A husband waits outside

A crying child pushes a child into the night

She was told he would come this time

Without leaving so much as a feather behind

To enact at last the perfect plan

One more sweet boy to be butchered by man

This tells the story of a child anywhere from 5 - 17 being forced to birth her rapists baby.

The first line mentions a husband, which can be interpreted as the child's husband - child brides are very common in a lot of places - or it could be the child's father, the husband of the child's mother. I personally think the first scenario is more likely.

The next lines mention that she was told she wouldn't be raped this time. Emphasis on the this time. The feather is a reference to the swan that raped Leda, which is how we know the child being born is a result of rape. In my opinion, this child bride was raped by her husband before they were married and, since her virtue was ruined, she was forced to marry him. Her family promised he would not rape her again, but he did and she became pregnant. This was the husband's "perfect plan." He would rape her, which forced her to marry him, and then rape her again to trap her in the marriage with a baby. The last line tells us that the baby was born male. He will grow up to be "butchered by men" likely meaning his father will be abusive or that he will grow up to be exactly like his father.

But the gateway to the world

Was still outside the reach of him

What never belonged to angels

Had never belonged to man

The swan upon Leda

Empire upon Jerusalem

The "gateway to the world," in my mind, refers to the female reproductive system. It has always been out of reach to this "him." He can't produce a child on his own so he rapes women to access the "gateway to the world."

The next bit, "what never belonged to angels had never belonged to man" is so personal to me. The bit about angels can be a reference to so many things. The angel can be Zeus raping Leda. The angel can be the Christian God forcing 13 year old Mary to carry Jesus. The angel is a representation of how women are treated mythologically. The thing that never belonged to these angels is, of course, the female body. The next line states that the female body has never belonged to men. To me, the greater implication is that men have taken their examples from the "angels." They think they're owed the female body because the gods took it as they pleased.

The next two lines are comparison lines. The swan is upon Leda like how the kingdom of Jerusalem has been historically and biblically conquered over and over and over again. This line does, however, imply that women are holy. We are sacred ground in the same way Jerusalem is - we are holy.

A grandmother smugglin' meds

Past where the god child-soldier

Setanta stood dead

A graceful turner of heads

Weaves through the checkpoints like a needle and the thread

Someone’s frightened boy waves her on

She offers a mother’s smile and soon she’s gone

The first line is pretty self explanatory: an old woman is smuggling medication, likely some sort of contraception or abortion pills. She could also be smuggling abortifacients - things that cause miscarriages such as mugwort.

The next part is more confusing to those of us who aren't Irish. Setanta is an Irish mythological figure, but his importance here doesn't come from his mythos. Setanta has been used by Irish nationalists ad a symbol for a unified Ireland. The knowledge that the grandmother is sneaking things past Setanta implies that she's bringing the medicine from Southern Ireland into Northern Ireland, where the abortion laws are stricter.

Hozier next describes the grandmother going through the checkpoints into Northern Ireland. She does this by being a graceful turner of heads. My impression is that she's using her beauty to distract the people checking her so she can get the medicine through. If you've ever read the Witcher books, there's a scene where Yennefer makes herself more beautiful so that people will look at her and not at Ciri, who is supposed to be dead. That was the first thing I associated with the "graceful turner of heads" line.

Beyond just beauty though, the grandmother is using her status as a weapon. She's just a sweet old lady, she wouldn't do anything wrong. To me, this is a reference to how women are often seen as too pure, too innocent, too submissive and obedient to cause issues. The grandmother knows she's viewed this way and uses it to her advantage.

The next line is a simple interaction. She has someone on the inside that helps with her smuggling operation. This boy, maybe one of the people working the checkpoints, maybe a police officer, or maybe just a young boy, helps the grandmother navigate to the people she needs to deliver the medication too.

The important thing about the boy is that he too is someone who is not suspected to be involved in the smuggling of abortifacients because he's a boy. Men as a societal class are rarely involved in the fight for women's rights. This boy will not be a main suspect if the smuggling is uncovered - and that is why he's doing it and not a young woman.

The gateway to the world

The gun in a trembling hand

Where nature unmakes the boundary

The pillar of myth still stands

The swan upon Leda

Occupier upon ancient land

This last verse is a slightly altered version of the chorus. The gateway to the world is, as we previously discussed, the female reproductive system. This time, however, there's a gun. This gun is likely the result of being denied an abortion. The woman has no way to stop the birth no - no way except an at home abortion. Perhaps she's horribly depressed, as people tend to be when they're pregnant with a rapists child. Whatever the reason, this woman has decided suicide is the answer. She will have an abortion by killing herself.

The next two lines, "where nature unmakes the boundary, the pillar of myth still stands," is about the fight for women's rights. We - women - are the "nature." We are unmaking the boundaries that men have placed upon us and our bodies. The pillar of myth, however, still stands in our way. This pillar of myth is, of course, the religious arguments that stop abortion access.

The last line of the song, "occupier upon ancient land" is very direct. Hozier is calling women an occupied nation, an oppressed people.

MUSICALITY ANALYSIS:

Swan Upon Leda is a very soft song, which doesn't seem to match the material. This is an incredibly angry song, but it's sung like a lullaby. To me, this is an incredibly important aspect of the song.

The first important thing about the softness is that it's a representation of female rage, in my opinion. Historically and still today, women are expected to carry themselves with dignity. Anger is not a dignified emotion. Angry women must often stay silent or soft to protect themselves. We don't have the privilege of a screaming match with men that hurt us because that might make them hurt us more. Our anger is, by necessity, a quiet affair.

The other important thing about the softness of the song is that it sounds like a lullaby. I think this has a few meanings. First of all, lullabies call babies to mind which is very fitting for a song about abortion. The second thing is that, to me, the lullaby implies that women inherit the grief of being occupied. Even the small, female baby listening to this lullaby understands the rage inside it. We are born with this quiet rage. It is our lullaby, the thing that lulls us to sleep.

#swan upon leda #hozier #literary analysis #song analysis #song dissection #i will never be the same again #i do not know how a man wrote a song that so perfectly encapsulates the experience of female rage #i do not want to know #feminism #feminist #unrealearth #unreal earth #i use the word female in here a lot but i swear im not a terf or a misogynist #im a nonbinary lesbian i swear #music #spiral's thoughts

[violetclarity]

The problem with my coworkers having seen me absolutely Going Through It while reading The Golden Enclaves is that now they all want to read the Scholomance trilogy, which would be fine (great, even) except if my coworker starts calling it a girl power story while completely ignoring the social commentary and deep morality of it steam will come out of my ears

#the scholomance #the scholomance trilogy #yeah I loved that every important character except for orion was female but I also have more advanced analytical abilities than this woman #this is the coworker who thinks that twilight is feminist because 'bella gets super powerful at the end' #who (by the same token) told me this week that she didn't like mockingjay because katniss had been so powerful and then got so weak #mockingjay wasn't my fave either but at least I'm able to recognize that katniss didn't 'get weak' #she was UNDERSTANDABLY TRAUMATIZED and dealing with A FUCKTON OF GRIEF AND TRAUMA which impacted her character #also this woman is 50. FIFTY. #which I say only bc one would HOPE that being FIFTY and having a MASTER'S DEGREE and WORKING IN A LIBRARY #that at some point in your life you would have picked up more complicated literary analysis skills #but no. twilight is feminist because bella becomes really powerful at the end. #sure. yeah. why not. I mean like no shade if you like twilight but it can't by any stretch of the imagination be called feminist ANYWAY #she liked spinning silver so I think she'll probably like it but I am gonna have to Brace Myself for those conversations #which is ironic bc all I want to do is discuss these books

[jkl-fff]

Barbie Movie Ramblings (Part 1)

Watched it yesterday and *loved* it. It was one of the most silly, snappy, stylish, and still smart movies I've seen in a long time, and thus I've got a lot of synapses shooting off. Going to let some of them ricochet around Tumblr instead of just inside my skull. Enjoy! Feel free to add on!

Okay ... Where to even start?

Firstly, Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling both deserve an Oscar for the depth and breadth of their acting range on display in this film, Greta Gerwig for the masterful execution of her directorial vision. And whoever wrote the casting credits deserves death for how unhelpful they are. Practically everyone is either just "Barbie" or "Ken", so how am I supposed to reference them easily here? Gods damn it, at least give them their titles, like "President Barbie" or "Journalist Barbie"!

I'm still giggling at lines like "Oh! The Supreme Court!" for the Miss Universe billboard, or Ken's confession "When I found out patriarchy wasn’t about horses, I lost interest," or Ruth Handler's ghost's self-deprecating boast "I am Mattel. At least, until the IRS got to me." I mean it in the most positive way imaginable when I say this movie was like a cohesive feverdream, like a frenetic session of children playing yet with an internally logical plot.

****

Okay, now for the more intellectual thoughts.

Apparently, a lot of people are arguing about whether or not this is really a good Feminist Movie(TM), whether or not it's a movie for Boys(TM), if it's anti-men, if it's just one big commercial for Mattel products, etc.

For that last one, yeah, of course it's selling Mattel products. But grow up, because it's not *just* a commercial. Much like "The Lego Movie" is selling legos AND ALSO a heartfelt story and a fascinating work of artistic performance in its own right. "Barbie" is a text worthy of analysis beyond "it's one big commercial", and part of how intellectually rich it is comes from the very fact that it engages with its own tangled roots in capitalist consumption.

As for whether or not it's for Boys(TM)--or for anyone at all, for that matter--I admit I've always thought such considerations were kinda stupid. Not everything is meant for everyone, obviously, nor should everything even try to be. But, by that same token, anything can be for anyone. People are not static and thus neither are audiences.

The idea of a Target Audience can be helpful, sometimes, but I think it's both grossly oversimplified and overextended nowadays (because capitalism and marketing). We need to remember, not everyone in a Target Audience will resonate with a given story, not everyone outside a Target Audience won't resonate with a story, and that that can change for individuals depending on ... heck, even what kinda day they're having. I loved this movie, but I probably wouldn't want to watch it on a day when I'm feeling really depressed. Maybe the producers and executives didn't market it with Boys(TM) in mind, but boys absolutely can and should watch "Barbie". It's a fun movie, and they should be allowed to enjoy it, too. And, more importantly, learn from it.

Is it anti-men? Pff! No. And only idiot conservatives would even think that's a worthwhile question worth asking.

As for if it's *really* a *good* Feminist Movie(TM) ... I think anyone asking this particular question is forgetting how complex and nuanced Feminism can be. Indeed, Feminism isn't really a single thing--it's not a unified monolith--but rather a bunch of connected and sometimes conflicting schools of thought, philosophies, political stances, and so on. In general, it really would be more accurate to say Feminisms (plural) than Feminism (singular). Giving a hard no, therefore, I reckon is insisting that it can't be Good Feminism(TM) because it doesn't fit someone's too narrow idea of what Real Feminism(TM) is/should be. Giving a hard yes is probably falling into the same trap.

Put another way, Feminism is a lot like Jewishness. It isn't really about finding The Absolute Answer(TM) to a question, but about the process of thinking and debating by which you come to a possibly impermanent answer.

To give some examples from the movie: Does the Barbie doll actually empower little girls? She shows them they can aspire to be more than just mothers, that they can be anyone and do anything ... But she also reifies this idea that women must look beautiful and be perfectly accessorized while doing it. It's not "yes or no", but "yes and no". Is the narrator's fourth-wall-breaking line "Note to film makers: Margot Robbie is not the right person to cast to make this point." (when Barbie is having a crisis about being inadequate, not being pretty enough or smart enough, etc.) one that undercuts or underlines the movie's emotional climax? It interrupts the flow of the dialogue and suggests that a woman's self-perception is less important than how others perceive her ... But it reminds us that she's not an everywoman, but rather an actress playing a specific doll in a fictional story, and this is a self-aware performance about the need to be self-aware. Not "yes or no" but "yes and no". It ends with Barbie being excited for a gynecology appointment. What the heck? On the one hand, it echoes the reality and physicality she now inhabits. She's real and alive, so she has a body with reproductive organs thus feminine health concerns that are being acknowledged in a way that is open and not shamed. She's no longer plastic and high-heeled and perfect, and thus will have blemishes and cellulite and flat feet, and that's wonderful ... But it also suggests the idea that the realness of womanhood is physical and medical and biological--suggests that it's situated not in her soul but in her body, not in who she is but what she has in her pants. Not "yes or no" but "yes and no".

Ironically, if anything, it might be a good Feminist Movie(TM) specifically because it doesn't try to give us simple, definitive answers about if the Barbie doll and "Barbie" itself are feminist icons. Feminisms are too complex and nuanced to give simple, definitive answers.

I've got one more thought (or string of thoughts) in me about this movie, I reckon. About how it's campy and doing nonstop drag (the Barbies are doing over-the-top femininity, the Ken's over-the-top masculinity, and even the Real World is doing over-the-top reality and grittiness ... except for the Mattel headquarters) and deconstructing itself, and how all that is foundational to its message. But this post has already gone on for too long than I originally anticipated. So I'll give voice to that idea in a bit.

#barbie #feminism #feminist #critical theory #literary analysis #ramblings #cinema #film #movies #barbie movie

[aloeverawrites]

#feminist #feminism #men's liberation #pop culture #pop culture detective #mental health #men's issues #sterotypes #trans masc #I'm relating to this video a little too hard #media #literary analysis #Youtube

[toadtaro]

"Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?"

“Sherry Ortner notes that in every society ‘the psychic mode associated with women seems to stand at both the bottom and the top of the scale of human modes of relating.’ Attempting to account for this ‘symbolic ambiguity,’ Ortner explains … by pointing out that women ‘can appear from certain points of view to stand both under and over (but really simply outside of the sphere of culture's hegemony.’ That is, precisely because a woman is denied the autonomy - the subjectivity - that the pen represents, she is not only excluded from culture (whose emblem might well be the pen) but she also becomes herself an embodiment of just those extremes of mysterious and intransigent Otherness which culture confronts with worship or fear, love or loathing. As ‘Ghost, fiend, and angel, fairy, witch, and sprite,’ she mediates between the male artist and the Unknown, simultaneously teaching him purity and instructing him in degradation.”

From The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar

#literary analysis #feminist literature #feminist criticism #toadtaro

[ladygoofball]

"A second approach to the understanding of 'The Huluppu-Tree" is through its characters. Enki and Ereshkigal battle in the prelude; the plot begins with the huluppu-tree and Inanna. The huluppu-tree sprouts by the Euphrates River, but soon it is struck by the South Wind and force into the waters. If it had not been for Inanna, the tree in its untended state of nature might have perished. Inanna rescues the tree from the waters and brings it to a place of cultivation. Only after Inanna has cared for the tree for a period of time in the enclosure of her garden do her wishes connected with it emerge. Just as in the first section, In the first days when everything needed was brought into being, In the first days when everything needed was properly nourished, life must be properly nourished and cared for before it can take root and begin to be differentiated. From the growing tree Inanna wishes to have a shining throne and a bed."

#xoxo inanna #canonical wifey spirit #sabbatical shitposting #diane wolkstein #feminist literature #literary analysis #you know i saw someone said inanna is a war goddess...like that is??? not who she is lol #just my two cents #in case anyone is paying attention #me to my dumuzi #anyway back to writing

[yggdraseed]

Women in Jujutsu Kaisen, Part 2: Sacrificial Lioness

This is the second part in a series of three posts. If you haven’t read the original, I don’t think it’s entirely necessary to do so, but it might provide some helpful context.

I’ll be the first to admit I may have buried the lead, in a way, with my first post on this subject. When people criticize GeGe Akutami’s portrayal of women, they don’t really target the Shibuya Incident and what came before. They level their criticisms at the events post-Shibuya, and so the events post-Shibuya are what I’ll be mainly talking about here.

I had intended to cover all of that in one post, but the first part of this analysis was already so long that about twenty very funny free-thinkers on Reddit all rolled their sleeves up and commented some variation of “Too long, won’t read.” It still cuts me like a knife, to this very day.

Now to everyone else, let’s review. Jujutsu Kaisen received a lot of praise early on for its portrayal of women, but over the duration of the manga’s run, there have been a very vocal segment of the fanbase who have problems with how that portrayal has developed into the current state of the story. Not only that, some even go so far as to say that GeGe didn’t just get worse at writing women, that GeGe secretly hates women, either because of conscious misogyny or passive, culturally-ingrained sexism that they just aren’t aware of.

So, I have quite a few problems with this take. Everyone’s entitled to their opinion, of course, but when it goes from having differing interpretations of the text in front of us to people speculating about the moral character of the author… well, you need to really work for that one. It’s one thing to say “Oh, the author meant well, but this just wasn’t quite good enough” — but to say the author had malicious intent is a different can of worms entirely.

How does an author go from writing women with such care as I have illustrated in my first post analyzing the subject to suddenly just bumbling around, screwing everything up? Why would an author who’s a misogynist write such vibrant, strong-willed, even inspirational characters like Nobara and Maki? Did GeGe randomly decide they want to sabotage their own success for mysterious reasons? Did someone secretly replace GeGe with an evil robot clone of GeGe to fulfill some secret plan to ruin the whole manga? Well, maybe. Or maybe this manga isn’t what a lot of its readers initially thought it was.

Everything But the Text To try and explain what I think about all of this, it’s going to be necessary to discuss things outside of Jujutsu Kaisen’s story. We’ve already started asking questions about GeGe Akutami’s values as a person, so the conversation can’t just stay limited to the characters, worldbuilding, themes, and other elements specific just to what’s within the manga’s pages. I tried to avoid doing this as much as possible in my first post, because once you start examining influences on the writing or reading of a story from outside of the story itself, things get messy. People are complicated, and often a locked box; that goes for readers and writers alike. Nobody can peer inside of another person’s heart or mind, so it’s hard to say anything concrete. Suffice to say that I am not going to make a habit out of trying to read tea leaves and divine an author’s thoughts and values, and I encourage you to not make a habit out of it either. That being said, let’s dip our toes into it just this once, and proceed with caution.

Even when you look to author interviews, it’s difficult to say for sure if an author can recall every single thing that was consciously or unconsciously influencing them when designing a character or planning a story’s structure. On top of that, good author won’t give away twists or reveals planned for the story’s future. They want you to read the damn thing, after all, not use substitutes for reading it. For example: would GeGe really tell us if Nobara was dead or not if the intention was to have her be revealed to have survive?. Would GeGe tell us if she’s alive or dead if the intention was for it to be ambiguous? And beyond that, while this is just my own interpretation, GeGe seems to be very closed-lipped about what the story’s themes are so they don’t color the reader’s experience. It’s a story that doesn’t give you neatly arranged answers to every question, so of course GeGe doesn’t want to make the audience thing there’s a “correct” or “incorrect” way to interpret what characters say and do.

Of course, there’s a corollary to all this subjective interpretation talk. It’s one thing to look at a character’s actions and try to interpret what motivates those actions, what they’ll do in the future, and what ideas are being worked out through that character. It’s something very different to try and use the story like reading tea leaves, to act like you can divine the author’s personality and moral values outside of what they choose to give away.

…On the other hand, every author puts a little bit of themselves in what they write. Their beliefs, their tastes, their assumptions about other people and life in general. For instance, GeGe clearly has a taste for horror, Japanese mythology, Buddhism, martial arts movies, and pro wrestling. We can see this in the way that Jujutsu Kaisen doesn’t just borrow Buddhist imagery like the names of bodhisattvas or how they’re depicted in art, but in how the themes of the story are heavily informed by the way Buddhism emphasizes death and the relationship of the self to the whole. You can see GeGe’s love for martial arts movies in references to said movies, e.g., the references to The Raid in Yuji’s fight with Choso. And you can see GeGe likes pro wrestling or at least has respect for it by the way that Yuki’s technique is named Bom Ba Ye.

A slight tangent: I hate Viz. Viz has bungled the official English release for Jujutsu Kaisen in ways I didn’t think were possible. Clunky, out-of-character dialogue and outright mistranslations aside, they completely failed to get the name of Yuki’s technique across. See, in Shonen Jump’s publications and in other manga, there’s this thing called furigana. Most Japanese is written in kanji, but for readers who struggle with kanji, furigana are included as a postscript spelling out the same word in hiragana so it’s easier to read. However, lots of authors — including GeGe — will use furigana to add extra meanings in how you pronounce something. For another example within Jujutsu Kaisen, the name of Todo’s technique is spelled in kanji as 不義遊戯, which translates to “Immorality” or “Unjust Game.” But the furigana are ブギウギ, or Bugi Ugi — Boogie Woogie. When adapted to the anime, they default to the furigana, so we get the wonder and the majesty that is Boogie Woogie.

Yuki’s technique is the same. The kanji read 星の怒り, which can be translated in a few different ways. TCB went with “Fury of the Stars,” which if you ask me is a hell of a lot cooler than going wiith “Star Rage.” But once again, the furigana are read differently. ボンバイエ — Bom Ba Ye.

The term Bom Ba Ye originates from the championship match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, held in Zaire and popularly dubbed The Rumble in the Jungle. At one point the crowd began chanting “Ali, bombaye! Ali, bombaye!” Which more-or-less translates to “Ali, finish him! Ali, finish him!” It became heavily associated with Ali after that. And after a match they had with each other in Japan, Ali gave Antonio Inoki his blessing to use a variation on the bombaye chant for his ring entrance music. Given how Inoki passed away last year, it seems that GeGe intended this to be, in part, an homage to the architect of Japan’s pro wrestling scene. So yeah, fuck Viz.

Tangent over. So yes, there are ways to get a feel for an author’s sensibilities from what they write, but it’s not some telescope into their psyche. And unless someone can give me evidence that GeGe Akutami looks down on or hates women outside of hot takes about the outcome of certain fights in this manga, you are never going to convince me.

People try to assign metrics to this series to gauge GeGe’s seriousness about female characters, and those have never impressed me either. I already touched on this in my last post, but the outcome of a fight does not determine a character’s value. To step outside the pages of Jujutsu Kaisen once again, let’s look to other Shonen Jump luminaries for some helpful examples that might be easier to digest.

In Naruto, we have the iconic fight at the Valley of the End when Naruto tries to stop Sasuke from leaving the village to join Orochimaru. Naruto loses, but in the long run, Sasuke is proven wrong and a mountain of misfortune befalls him and the village as a result of his selfish, obsessive actions. He ultimately comes back to join the village in the final act, after having his assumptions about the world and the people around him disproven.

My point is that despite Shonen manga being so heavily focused on battle and getting stronger, there has always been a throughline where being strong by itself doesn’t make a character right. And Jujutsu Kaisen riffs on that by having lots of cases where strong characters are dethroned by intelligent tactics, teamwork, or simply a blind spot created by their own limited, strength-oriented view of the world. Strength and winning fights are not the sole criteria for a character’s value, and that’s not just true for Jujutsu Kaisen, but for more conventional Shonen as a whole.

The other metric I see people attempt to use is screentime. If one character gets 50 pages and another character gets 70 pages, that means GeGe values the character who got 70 pages more and the character who got 50 pages is a bum, is worthless to the story, and GeGe hates that character, is how the argument goes.

I hate math in general, but especially when people try to use it as a shortcut or a way around actually engaging with a story. This is like a more insidious version of the power levels problem some Shonen and their fan communities have, where people use something so arbitrary as the number of pages or panels a character appears in to evaluate their importance — both to their subjective experience, and from the perspective of the writer.

Let’s do what we did with strength and fight outcomes again.

In One Piece, Shanks is a character who almost never appears. Hundreds of chapters will go by with no insights into what Shanks is doing. But if you would say that Shanks doesn’t matter to the story of One Piece, you would be laughed out of the entire One Piece fan community for just how stupid that take is. Shanks is the reason the story of One Piece happened, because he saved Luffy’s life and entrusted him with a goal: “Take this straw hat, keep it safe for me, and return it to me when you’ve become a great pirate someday.” He doesn’t need to appear very often, he is never far from the reader’s mind and casts an immense shadow over the story.

Now, characters the author doesn’t consider important do often appear. One Piece has a number of examples, like Tilestone. Tilestone is as minor as minor characters get, in terms of hissignificance to the story and in terms of how many pages of that story they appear in. So, what’s the difference? Well, Tilestone is a gag character. He exists to bolster the number of colorful characters who appear in the story; worldbuilding and set dressing as a person. Other than that, he adds a bit of comedy and texture — Tilestone is incapable of speaking without yelling, and this creates friction with other characters and complicates things involving him. An equivalent in Jujutsu Kaisen could be the trio of curse users that Megumi, Itadori, and Ino fight in Shibuya. Minor, extremely minor characters that serve a bit role.

All Things Tsukumo Yuki I think it’s time to bring this fully back around to Jujutsu Kaisen. We’ve gotten some context, now, by looking at other Shonen Jump series and some clear cut examples of how a character’s value is not determined by win-loss ratios or page counts. We’ve seen how even in these goofy Japanese comics for teenage boys, there are things going on under the surface that aren’t immediately apparent if you only look at what characters say and do and what happens to them. There are ideas being worked on under the surface. Let’s take this understanding, and apply it to the most contentious fight in all of Jujutsu Kaisen and ground zero for arguments that GeGe can’t write or doesn’t respect women.

That’s right, no more hemming and hawing at ringside. We’re crossing the top rope and mixing it up with Yuki Tsukumo vs. Kenjaku. It’s Yukimania! Snap into a Slim Jim!

So, let’s start by pulling together a profile of Yuki purely off of what the story gives us. She’s one of the older active characters when you don’t include life spans extended by unnatural methods, as she was already an established sorcerer and making a name for herself when Geto and Gojo were on the verge of graduating from high school. Already considered a Special Grade, she was notorious for not accepting missions and for generally thumbing her nose at the jujutsu sorcery establishment.

Her only real involvement with the wider sorcery world was mentoring Aoi Todo, her only known student. Yuki’s habit of asking people their type — a personality test that lets her gather info on other sorcerers without them realizing it — unabashed confidence and sincerity, and general flair for theatrics all have rubbed off on him, and we can assume it’s her tutelage that moulded Todo into such a stand-out, being able to reach First Grade as a sorcerer despite still being a student at the Kyoto Jujutsu Technical School, not coming from a sorcery family, and not having an inherently powerful technique. Fun fact: Todo’s scar comes from one of his training sessions with her. She got around by motorcycle and spent a lot of time overseas, researching sorcery and the soul with the aim to completely overturn the established order: she wanted to break the deadlock between sorcerers, humans, and cursed spirits.

The conclusion Geto had reached about the futility of trying to exorcise curses when human emotion was constantly creating more was old news to her by the time of Hidden Inventory and Premature Death, and she was searching for a way to prevent cursed spirits from being born. After Toji’s death posed a dead end for erasing cursed energy from the human race completely, she gravitated to the idea of making all human beings sorcerers, thus giving them the control over their cursed energy that prevents sorcerers from creating cursed spirits. Now, while Geto had the idea of killing all non-sorcerers, Yuki never actually condoned this. But she didn’t shut Geto down for this thought of his, either. She told him that he was going to have to make a choice whether to keep going down that line of thought and where it would lead him, or to reject that line of thought entirely. This is something that I think people get confused on, so let's put a pin in it for now.

We learn during the events leading up to her fight with Kenjaku that Yuki is a former Star Plasma Vessel, and we see that she is openly hostile to Tengen. Once the fight itself unfolds, we learn that Yuki’s cursed technique is Bom Ba Ye — the ability to increase her virtual mass.

Virtual mass is a phenomenon where an object behaves as if it has more or less mass than it actually does. So, Yuki’s technique doesn’t cause a perceptible change in mass for her — but her surroundings will be affected like her mass is increased. This means she can still move and fight unburdened while adding the devastating force of a huge mass increase to her attacks. As part of a Binding Vow to improve the effect of Bom Ba Ye further, the only viable targets for this virtual mass increase are Yuki and her shikigami-cursed tool hybrid, Garuda. It also seems that, due to the fluctuations in virtual mass occurring around her, Yuki can’t be targeted by conceptual techniques like what Kenjaku’s most powerful cursed spirits use. Her virtual mass changes so much that it’s as if the definition of who and what “Tsukumo Yuki” is becomes subject to change, meaning that techniques that interact with concepts on a metaphysical level can’t affect her.

As for her personality, Yuki is very direct and straightforward. She doesn’t mince words or hide her intentions — if she likes you, she’ll tell you. If she wants you dead, she’ll tell you that, too. She’s a rebel, and you can see that in everything from her choice of transportation to how she talks to what she occupies herself with. Gojo wanted to reform jujutsu society, but Tsukumo wanted to tear it down entirely. She’s an ethical anarchist who wants to create true equality — either making it so everyone’s a sorcerer, or so nobody is a sorcerer — and cut right to the chase with fixing the problems in the world. There’s a sense of urgency that propels her to fight hard, live hard, and make sure the world changes in a profound way before another generation has to climb up through the muck that the old guard has burdened them with.

During the run-up to the fateful fight with Kenjaku, we see Yuki’s interactions with Tengen and Choso unfold. She takes a liking to Choso — he’s her type, after all. A hard-working guy who may not have a lot of charisma, but makes up for with dedication and a willingness to fight for what he believes in. Choso confides in her about the guilt he feels for inadvertently making his brothers fight each other to the death, breaking down crying at the fact that he not only sent Eso and Kechizu to die, but that he made Yuji, the baby brother they didn’t know they had, land the killing blow. We also see the animosity Yuki has for Tengen, and how she sympathizes with the other Star Plasma Vessels who merged with Tengen. It’s implied that she’s able to sense their presence and get some idea of their thoughts and emotions within Tengen, but she refuses to share that knowledge.

Once we get to the fight, Yuki puts Kenjaku through the wringer. Kenjaku has mostly skated by through every fight with a combination of Geto’s cursed technique and crafty tactics that always give them the advantage. Choso goes out first to gather information for Yuki before she tags in, and although he’s on the verge of death, he forces Kenjaku to use a technique besides Cursed Spirit Manipulation. Knowing now that one of Kenjaku’s saved up techniques is related to gravity, Yuki enters the fray. She ends up immediately putting pressure on Kenjaku that we haven’t seen anyone else come close to managing, one-shotting a Special Grade cursed spirit and breaking Kenjaku’s arm with one punch — a punch so strong that it breaks through a barrier put up by Tengen, the foremost expert on barriers. From there, Yuki and Kenjaku engage in mind games, close-quarters combat, and Choso even joins in another fine round of Jujumptsu Kaisen before Kenjaku calls one of Yuki’s bluffs, expands their domain, and chips away at her until Yuki is dealt a blow to the stomach, destroying her body’s ability to produce cursed energy. She has Tengen move Choso to safety, then sends her cursed technique out of control, increasing her density until she turns into a black hole. Between her willpower and Tengen’s use of barrier techniques, they restrict the black hole’s growth so that it loses momentum and fades. Kenjaku survives by revealing that the technique they retained from using Kaori Itadori as a host is actually Anti-Gravity System, that they’ve been using technique inversion, and that they managed to endure with Anti-Gravity System until the black hole dissipated. But before she died, Yuki left Kenjaku with these last words: “You control gravity, but aren’t you thinking too small!? Gravity, mass, time, it all boils down to…”

Aside from a brief appearance in Todo’s flashback and in the Hidden Inventory/Premature Death arcs covering Gojo’s past, showing up to save the students trapped by Uraume’s ice in Shibuya, and helping to set up the plan to combat the Culling Games, that’s all she wrote for Yuki’s appearances in the story. However, that’s not the end of her influence. We’ve got Choso carrying on her will by surviving because she protected him, we’ve got her research into the soul that Choso passed along to Itadori, and we’ve got those last words to Kenjaku. It all boils down to… what, exactly? Kenjaku is someone who prides themselves on these plans spanning centuries and these ambitious designs for a new form of cursed energy-based life, and yet, Yuki mocked them for still “thinking too small.” This might be one of those things that’s left up to interpretation, or it might be we’ll learn the rest of what Yuki said to Kenjaku at a pivotal moment — but setting her last words aside, she’s still got a lasting influence. Time will tell what will come of the things she’s left behind.

Subtext, More Than Words So, that’s the text. We’ve covered everything we can get out of just looking at the events of the story and the words and actions of the characters. But, that’s not the whole story. There’s still a lot of subtext left, and a huge part of Yuki’s story plays out entirely in subtext.

Let me pose a question. Why have Yuki fight Kenjaku? Matching up Choso to fight Kenjaku is pretty obvious: Kenjaku tortured and experimented on Choso’s mother, manipulated him and the other Death Paintings, and ultimately abandoned them. Classic revenge fight.

But while there isn’t a clear reason for Yuki to fight Kenjaku other than to guard Tengen on the surface, there’s a very interesting reason in the story’s subtext. Yuki is a former Star Plasma Vessel — as in, one of the candidates who didn’t merge with Tengen. This doesn’t seem to convey any special abilities onto her, but it does give her a very unique relationship with sorcerer society as a whole and Tengen specifically — which, when you really get down to it, are the same thing.

Tengen isn’t some secret traitor, and isn’t some malicious conservative presence. Tengen is the system, and is the passive stand-in for all the people who benefit from or participate in the system whether they realize it or not. It’s why Tengen doesn’t have a distinct human appearance. With her mastery of barriers, Tengen keeps the whole of jujutsu society functioning — and in order to prevent her from evolving to something beyond and potentially hostile to humanity, the Star Plasma Vessel merger is held every few hundred years. Young people, human beings, have their future and their unique, independent identity stolen in order to hold up the status quo. Used up like raw materials just so that the system doesn’t change or face any challenges to it.

Yuki narrowly avoided that fate, and you don’t need to squint very hard to see that having this potential outcome foisted onto her has heavily influenced her view on life. The point of her being a Star Plasma Vessel wasn’t to set up some sort of future plot point where the Star Plasma Vessel would be used to stop Kenjaku or something, it was to contextualize why she is an ethical anarchist. She came face to face with the possibility of being reduced to material so the system can keep going, and she wants to tear the system down to protect future Star Plasma Vessels from being used up like she almost was. It’s her self-imposed responsibility to the future. Not something forced onto her, but a fate and a mission she chose.

It’s why she doesn’t dissuade Geto directly when he proposes killing all non-sorcerers. She can’t in good conscience pursue a future of freedom and indivduality if she makes a young person’s choices for him. Remember, she’s well into adulthood while Geto is just late into his adolescence during their conversation together; to her, he’s still a kid. And so, she gives him her advice, and tells him he has to make his own decision at some point, then commit to it. It ended up being one of the contributing factors to Geto’s downfall, but the alternative was for Yuki to take his freedom of choice away by pressuring him to do what she thinks is right. The outcome wasn’t clear at the time, but what was clear was what Yuki’s personal ethics told her to tell him. It’s why she sympathizes with Choso. She probably went through a similar crisis as Choso, a feeling of being dehumanized: her by being told she might have to surrender her individual existence as a human being to merge with Tengen, Choso by being half-human, half-curse. Even though Choso wants to die for her, she tells him that he’s only died as a curse, and has Tengen protect him so he can live as a human. Yuki won’t allow someone to die to protect her. She won’t use other people to further her goals or escape the consequences of her choices.

It’s why, finally, she has her first and final fight with Kenjaku. Because when you get right down to it, the ultimate goal of the Culling Games — to merge the non-sorcerers of Japan with Tengen after she’s been allowed to evolve beyond humanity, all in order to create a new form of cursed energy-based life — is very similar to the way the Star Plasma Vessel merger was used to sustain the status quo through Tengen. They both rob human beings of life and agency in order to further the goals of an individual or small cadre who seek to benefit from it. Yuki isn’t fighting to protect Tengen, Yuki is fighting to protect the people of Japan from being consolidated into a single non-identity by Kenjaku’s experiment. Yuki is fighting to protect every non-sorcerer from having their individuality and, indeed, their lives stolen like hers almost was.

And in the end, she loses the fight to kill Kenjaku, but preserves her ideals even in death. If Black Hole hadn’t had its growth contained by her willpower and Tengen’s barriers, it would have killed Kenjaku, without a doubt. Anti-Gravity System would have eventually used up all of Kenjaku’s cursed energy, leaving them unprotected from the ravages of the singularity. But at the same time, it would have meant destroying the planet and all life on Earth — and killing Kenjaku at that great a cost would have been such a Pyrrhic victory that it might as well have not been a victory at all. So Yuki gave it her best shot, and bet on the people she had protected to finish the fight if her final gambit didn’t succeed.

If I may indulge in a pet theory, I suspect that Yuki is going to get the last laugh. I suspect that the ultimate downfall of Kenjaku’s plan will, either before or after the merger, be the conversion of every non-sorcerer in Japan into a sorcerer. Sorcerers can protect themselves from the merger while non-sorcerers can’t, and it would be the ultimate refutation of the way Kenjaku sneers at modern humans and sorcerers as weak and helpless. Give them all cursed techniques and see what fresh hell they create. Imagine Sasaki, Yuki, Saori, and all the non-sorcerer humans we’ve seen awakening innate techniques all at once, and what kind of chaos and new possibilities that would create. We’d get Yuki’s goal of a world without cursed spirits and Gojo’s vision of an age where the term “Special Grade” can’t do justice to the level of sorcerer running around. It would make the Golden Age of Sorcery in the Heian era look like a god damn clown college by comparison, if you gave nuclear physicists, philosophers, CEOs, stay-at-home moms, historians, mathematicians, bakery owners, NEET otaku, and every other shade of human being in Japan their own unique cursed technique to use, it would prove just how small Kenjaku was thinking by limiting their view point to just themselves and their ideals — even a thousand years of experiences wouldn’t prepare them for that.

But I digress. My point is that there is a lot more to Yuki than just what’s shown on the pages of the manga, and it’s a disservice to her to act like she had no point as a character. Did she only get one fight? Yes, and it’s one of the most bombastic, high octane fights in the series, packed with strategy, style, and the top shelf violent action GeGe is known for. Were her appearances limited? Yes, and each appearance makes the most efficient use of time possible to make her stand out, as well as giving the reader food for thought — if they’ll just try a taste. Did she die violently? Yes, and that’s not a problem.

Pain, Suffering, and What Lies Beyond Pain and Suffering Let’s step out of the series one more time. When left with no further recourse, people will often argue that the way women are written in Jujutsu Kaisen is bad and wrong because of the violent injuries or deaths they suffer. I’m here to tell you that this is the worst argument of all because of the alternative it implies. Saying this implies “Women can only fight if they win. Women shouldn’t die in manga, and if they do, they have to die pretty without any ugly injuries.”

Now there is absolutely a precedent for the suffering of women being used for cheap, borderline pornographic exploitation. One of the great problems of the Shonen genre is how the deaths of female characters are used purely to motivate the male main character by holding a woman hostage, injuring, killing, or doing even worse to her to force him to fight. One of the great problems of the horror genre is maiming women for cheap shock value. Given that Jujutsu Kaisen sits at the intersection of Shonen and horror, there’s good reason to be concerned about how often women die in Jujutsu Kaisen.

I’m sorry to once again harangue you about other manga in a post about Jujutsu Kaisen, but the Big Three of Shonen manga are all notorious for having subpar depictions of female characters. One Piece’s writing for female characters isn’t terrible, but their visual designs almost invariably fall into the sex bomb supermodel type or the fat and dumpy, borderline meanspirited parody of an old woman type with very, very little in-between. Bleach has the audacity to set up two arcs back-to-back where the goal of the entire arc is to rescue a damsel in distress. Naruto is notorious for sidelining female characters, marrying off 90% of them at the end, and making jokes out of the female characters who don’t get married. Sakura spends the whole series chasing after Sasuke, who has shown indifference at best and open animosity to her at worst, and her ultimate reward is getting married off to an absentee husband and father.

Once again, however, context is everything. The above examples are problematic for robbing women of agency and using them as tools to further a male character’s growth. People accuse Nobara’s death of being this, but when you look at the context, this isn’t the case at all. She isn’t taken hostage, she chooses to chase Mahito and secure the kill, because it’s what she does. She goes for the kill when she’s got her target on the ropes. Her dying doesn’t lead Yuji to get some power up like some people claim it does. It breaks him. Yuji ultimately ends up defeating Mahito, but people always leave out everything between Nobara’s death and his win. He breaks down, his soul crushed, the Black Flash that he’s used to such great effect being used on him by Mahito — a turnaround that not only crushes any feeling Yuji may have had of being special, but that also helps make Mahito’s case that he and Yuji are just the same. It’s only Todo’s intervention and Arata putting Nobara’s condition into stasis, thereby giving Yuji faint hope she might make it, that saves him from giving up and letting himself die. He ultimately defeats Mahito not because of Nobara’s death giving him some power-up, but because Mahito got too comfortable with winning and gave Yuji a reason to never stop seeking his destruction. Yuji wins the fight not because Nobara dying sent him into a quasi-Super Saiyan rage of power, but because he refused to let her death or Nanami’s death be meaningless, and that meaning gave him the enduring core of inner strength that a flimsy nihilist like Mahito lacks.

The Shonen genre is defined by battle — often violent battle — or other challenges that the characters have to overcome. Growth through adversity is the name of the game, and a bad Shonen will only have growth, never adversity. It’s why overpowered isekai protagonists often evoke so much disgust from the broader community of Shonen enthusiasts: they’re a vehicle for cheap, easy wish-fulfillment that asks for nothing in return.

In a series where fighting is the norm, if women aren’t put on the front lines of those defining battles, that immediately creates a sense of inequality. It carries the implication that the author believes women can’t fight, or shouldn’t fight. If women do fight, but always lose, then it implies the author believes women are weak and need men to protect them. If women fight, but always win, on the other hand, then they don’t have a chance to face the same growth through adversity that makes their male counterparts interesting and fulfilling to watch. The best Shonen battle manga are so enjoyable because you get to see characters face challenges they’re not guaranteed to come out of victorious (or even alive), dig deep, and grow as people in order to overcome the adversity that they face. So, what do we get in Jujutsu Kaisen? Well, for one thing, we see Nobara facing a weak, but crafty cursed spirit early on. It takes a child as a hostage to manipulate her into not fighting it directly. This near failure on her part is not due to her being a woman, it’s explicitly due to her being from the countryside, where curses tend to be more animalistic and less inclined to strategy due to the lower population density and, thus, lower concentration of cursed energy. Nobara quickly learns from her mistake, and uses the cursed spirit’s severed arm (courtesy of Yuji) to kill it before it escapes. We see her get split off from the main trio twice: once in the juvenile detention center, once during the fight with the Fingerbearer and the Death Painting brothers. Both times, she doesn’t just let herself be taken captive, she immediately starts fighting. She’s got a mountain of dead cursed spirits underfoot before she runs out of nails in the first case, and in the second, she’s putting up so much of a fight that Eso tries to run away from her before Yuji and Kechizu show up. She then proceeds to turn the whole two-on-two fight around by using Resonance to turn Eso’s technique against him and Kechizu, eventually forcing him to deactivate it.

And we see Yuki, allowed to fight and die for what she believes in. The sacrificial lioness who bared her fangs at injustice and chose to die for her ideals, never letting others go to the slaughter in her stead, never using them as stepping stones. Sexism doesn’t just come in the form of putting women down — it also comes in the form of sanitizing and idealizing the idea of a woman, putting her on a pedestal where she has no agency. A golden cage is still a cage, and nobody can truly be happy unless they have the freedom of choice to take risks, fail sometimes, and keep learning and growing through it all. To hand female characters easy victories without a challenge is as much of a disservice as to give them no victories at all. And a woman’s wish fulfillment power fantasy amounts to about as much as a man’s wish fulfillment power fantasy: everyone is entitled to wish things were easier, to have whatever they want, and to seek out stories where just that happens, but at the end of the day, it’s going to crumble when you’re met with the bittersweet milieu of reality. Personally, I am always going to be more interested in watching people fight, take risks, learn, self-actualize, and overcome challenges.

Jujutsu Kaisen’s appeal is that no victories come easily, the losses mount, the scars deepen, and the wounds never heal. But there’s meaning in fighting even if you lose, and the more bitter the failures you face along the way, the sweeter victory will taste if you get there. It would be disingenous if GeGe Akutami put so much effort into making the female characters self-driven, independent, and formidable, only to then leave them untested and hand them victories without subjecting them to the same adversity as the male characters. Willpower means nothing unless it’s tested, and success is meaningless unless the risk of failure is also a possibility.

Here we arrive at the end, on the far side of a post more than twice the length of my last one. I’m not going to apologize, but I am grateful to those of you who kept reading through all of that. I don’t have any grand concluding statements, because I think that this whole beast speaks for itself. Hopefully this will all be worth the investment of time and energy on my part and yours. My next and final post in this series is going to be much shorter, much more focused, and much more personal. Look forward to it!

#jujutsu kaisen #nobara kugisaki #yuki tsukumo #akutami gege #feminist literary analysis #shonen #thematic analysis #manga analysis #spoilers #jjk manga spoilers

[mactiir]

I know the average reading comprehension on this site is zero but I'm different. I'm applying wildly inappropriate analysis lenses to popcorn media. I'm doing a queer theory reading of Horus Heresy novels. Now I'm doing feminist analysis of Warhammer 40k canon. Now I'm applying Marxist analysis to The Outsiders. Time for a historical analysis of The Locked Tomb. A post-colonial reading of the entirety of Doctor Who. A psychological anlaysis of Twilight. On the horseshoe scale of reading comprehension I'm at "so much reading comprehension that it loops back around to not understanding books at all actually". You can't stop me. I'm literary analysis Georg

#I paid many thousands of dollars for this degree #and by god i will use it #literature #Literary analysis #Literature analysis #Media analysis #literary criticism #reading #reading comprehension #meta analysis #literature major #literature memes #lit crit #media literacy

[asparklethatisblue]

thinking about how the Sherlock Holmes stories have quite a few cases of “young woman being abused or harassed or tricked so a man might take control of her finances”. Parental figures or potential husbands and so on. Where the woman can’t do much to help herself, and Holmes sometimes breaks the law to help her.

i’ve heard the stories be described as proto feminist, and yeah. I’m not one for for doing literary analysis but there is so much in these stories of Holmes showing compassion to those society offers no protection to. Not just young women either. I don’t know what people are reading when they say Holmes was never kind. He’s only a bitch to people who actively annoy him or threaten someone he vowed to help

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

Maybe not the thing you want to be known for but a professor (only half jokingly) just mentioned the existence of an up-and-coming academic subfield of literary analysis aptly named "Swiftology" and told us about some renowned literary professor's book on Swift being published soon and well it made me think of your reputation as a Gaylor scholar-

not that out there tbh, professors love using widely-known and easily accessible pop cultural moments as a lens and stepping stone with which to teach broader concepts. like I did a little google on up and coming Swift-themed classes and it's p much what you would expect re: using her music and career to get students thinking about literary analysis, social trends, etc. it's a smart way to get student attention on something they might not otherwise get excited about. when I was an undergrad there was a "Beyoncé class," which was actually a class using the success of Lemonade to trick students at my white-ass university into taking a class on introductory Black feminist studies.

anyway having said that @ any university let me come teach a class on conspiracies using gaylor as a lens please please please please please please please the publicity will be sooooo crazy

#I would have loved to take the beyonce class but unfortunately the professor and I had personal beef :/

[regulusrules]

Yo, I saw your post about orientalism in relation to the "hollywood middle-east" tiktok!

How can a rando and university dropout get into and learn more about? Any literature or other content to recommend?

Hi!! Wow, you have no idea how you just pressed a button. I'll unleash 5+ years on you. And I'll even add for you open-sourced works that you can access as much as I can!

1. Videos

I often find this is the best medium nowadays to learn anything! I'll share with you some of the best that deal with the topic in different frames

• This is a video of Edward Said talking about his book, Orientalism. Said is the Palestinian- American critic who first introduced the term Orientalism, and is the father of postcolonial studies as a critical literary theory. In this book, you’ll find an in-depth analysis of the concept and a deconstruction of western stereotypes. It’s very simple and he explains everything in a very easy manner.

• How Islam Saved Western Civilization. A more than brilliant lecture by Professor Roy Casagranda. This, in my opinion, is one of the best lectures that gives credit to this great civilization, and takes you on a journey to understand where did it all start from.

• What’s better than a well-researched, general overview Crash Course about Islam by John Green? This is not necessarily on orientalism but for people to know more about the fundamental basis of Islam and its pillars. I love the whole playlist that they have done about the religion, so definitely refer to it if you're looking to understand more about the historical background! Also, I can’t possibly mention this Crash Course series without mentioning ... ↓

• The Medieval Islamicate World. Arguably my favourite CC video of all times. Hank Green gives you a great thorough depiction of the Islamic civilization when it rose. He also discusses the scientific and literary advancements that happened in that age, which most people have no clue about! And honestly, just his excitement while explaining the astrolabe. These two truly enlightened so many people with the videos they've made. Thanks, @sizzlingsandwichperfection-blog

2. Documentaries

• This is an AMAZING documentary called Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Villifies A People by the genius American media critic Jack Shaheen. He literally analysed more than 1000 movies and handpicked some to showcase the terribly false stereotypes in western depiction of Arab/Muslim cultures. It's the best way to go into the subject, because you'll find him analysing works you're familiar with like Aladdin and all sorts.

• Spain’s Islamic Legacy. I cannot let this opportunity go to waste since one of my main scopes is studying feminist Andalusian history. There are literal gems to be known about this period of time, when religious coexistence is documented to have actually existed. This documentary offers a needed break from eurocentric perspectives, a great bird-view of the Islamic civilization in Europe and its remaining legacy (that western history tries so hard to erase).

• When the Moors Ruled in Europe. This is one of the richest documentaries that covers most of the veiled history of Al-Andalus (Muslim Spain). Bettany Hughes discusses some of the prominent rulers, the brilliance of architecture in the Arab Muslim world, their originality and contributions to poetry and music, their innovative inventions and scientific development, and lastly, La Reconquista; the eventual fall and erasure of this grand civilization by western rulers.

3. Books

• Rethinking Orientalism by Reina Lewis. Lewis brilliantly breaks the prevailing stereotype of the “Harem”, yk, this stupid thought westerns projected about arab women being shut inside one room, not allowed to go anywhere from it, enslaved and without liberty, just left there for the sexual desires of the male figures, subjugated and silenced. It's a great read because it also takes the account of five different women living in the middle east.

• Nocturnal Poetics by Ferial Ghazoul. A great comparative text to understand the influence and outreach of The Thousand and One Nights. She applies a modern critical methodology to explore this classic literary masterpiece.

• The Question of Palestine by Edward Said. Since it's absolutely relevant, this is a great book if you're looking to understand more about the Palestinian situation and a great way to actually see the perspective of Palestinians themselves, not what we think they think.

• Arab-American Women's Writing and Performance by S.S. Sabry. One of my favourite feminist dealings with the idea of the orient and how western depictions demeaned arab women by objectifying them and degrading them to objects of sexual desire, like Scheherazade's characterization: how she was made into a sensual seducer, but not the literate, brilliantly smart woman of wisdom she was in the eastern retellings. The book also discusses the idea of identity and people who live on the hyphen (between two cultures), which is a very crucial aspect to understand arabs who are born/living in western countries.

• The Story of the Moors in Spain by Stanley Lane-Poole. This is a great book if you're trying to understand the influence of Islamic culture on Europe. It debunks this idea that Muslims are senseless, barbaric people who needed "civilizing" and instead showcases their brilliant civilization that was much advanced than any of Europe in the time Europe was labelled by the Dark Ages. (btw, did you know that arabic was the language of knowledge at that time? Because anyone who was looking to study advanced sciences, maths, philosophy, astronomy etc, had to know arabic because arabic-speaking countries were the center of knowledge and scientific advancements. Insane, right!)

• Convivencia and Medieval Spain. This is a collection of essays that delve further into the idea of “Convivencia”, which is what we call for religious coexistence. There's one essay in particular that's great called Were Women Part of Convivencia? which debunks all false western stereotypical images of women being less in Islamic belief. It also highlights how arab women have always been extremely cultured and literate. (They practiced medicine, studied their desired subjects, were writers of poetry and prose when women in Europe couldn't even keep their surnames when they married.)

4. Novels / Epistolaries

• Granada by Radwa Ashour. This is one of my favourite novels of all time, because Ashour brilliantly showcases Andalusian history and documents the injustices and massacres that happened to Muslims then. It covers the cultural erasure of Granada, and is also a story of human connection and beautiful family dynamics that utterly touches your soul.

• Dreams of Trespass by Fatema Mernissi. This is wonderful short read written in autobiographical form. It deconstructs the idea of the Harem in a postcolonial feminist lens of the French colonization of Morocco.

• Scheherazade Goes West by Mernissi. Mernissi brilliantly showcases the sexualisation of female figures by western depictions. It's very telling, really, and a very important reference to understand how the west often depicts middle-eastern women by boxing them into either the erotic, sensual beings or the oppressed, black-veiled beings. It helps you understand the actual real image of arab women out there (who are not just muslims btw; christian, jew, atheist, etc women do exist, and they do count).

• Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. This is a feminist travel epistolary of a British woman which covers the misconceptions that western people, (specifically male travelers) had recorded and transmitted about the religion, traditions and treatment of women in Constantinople, Turkey. It is also a very insightful sapphic text that explores her own engagement with women there, which debunks the idea that there are no queer people in the middle east.

---------------------

With all of these, you'll get an insight about the real arab / islamic world. Not the one of fanaticism and barbarity that is often mediated, but the actual one that is based on the fundamental essences of peace, love, and acceptance.

#orientalism #literature #arab #middle east #islam #feminism #book recommendations #reference #documentary #western stereotypes #eurocentrism #queer #queer studies #gender studies #women studies #cultural studies #history #christianity #judaism #books #regulusrules asks #regulusrules recs #If you need more recs #or can’t access certain references #feel free to message me and I’ll help you out!

[kaladinkholins]

Seeing fan discussions about Blue Eye Samurai and especially Mizu's identity is so annoying sometimes. So let me just talk about it real quick.

First off, I have to emphasise that different interpretations of the text are always important when discussing fiction. That's how the whole branch of literary studies came to be, and what literary criticism and analysis is all about: people would each have their own interpretation of what the text is saying, each person applying a different lens or theory through which to approach the text (ie. queer theory, feminist theory, reader response theory, postcolonial theory, etc) when analysing it. And while yes, you can just take everything the authors say as gospel, strictly doing so would leave little room for further analysis and subjective interpretation, and both of these are absolutely necessary when having any meaningful discussion about a piece of media.

With that being said, when discussing Blue Eye Samurai, and Mizu's character in particular, I always see people only ever interpret her through a queer lens. Because when discussing themes of identity, yes, a queer reading can definitely apply, and in Mizu's story, queer themes are definitely present. Mizu has to hide her body and do her best to pass in a cisheteronormative society; she presents as a man 99% of the time and is shown to be more comfortable in men's spaces (sword-fighting) than in female spaces (homemaking). Thus, there's nothing wrong with a queer reading at all. Hell, some queer theorists interpret Jo March from Little Women as transmasc and that's totally valid, because like all analyses, they are subjective and argumentative; you have the choice to agree with an interpretation or you can oppose it and form your own.

To that end, I know many are equally adamant that Mizu is strictly a woman, and that's also also a completely valid reading of the text, and aligns with the canon "Word of God", as the creators' intention was to make her a woman. And certainly, feminist themes in the show are undeniably present and greatly colour the narrative, and Episode 4 & 5 are the clearest demonstrations of this: Mizu's protectiveness of Madame Kaji and her girls, Mizu's trauma after killing Kinuyo, her line to Akemi about how little options women have in life, and the way her husband had scorned her for being more capable than him in battle.

I myself personally fall into the camp of Mizu leaning towards womanhood, so i tend to prefer to use she/her pronouns for her, though I don't think she's strictly a cis woman, so I do still interpret her under the non-binary umbrella. But that's besides my point.

My gripe here, and the thing that spurred me to write this post, is that rarely does this fandom even touch upon the more predominant themes of colonialism and postcolonial identities within the story. So it definitely irks me when people say that the show presenting Mizu being cishet is "boring." While it's completely fine to have your opinion and to want queer rep, a statement like that just feels dismissive of the rest of the representation that the show has to offer. And it's frustrating because I know why this is a prevalent sentiment; because fandom culture is usually very white, so of course a majority of the fandom places greater value on a queer narrative (that aligns only with Western ideas of queerness) over a postcolonial, non-Western narrative.

And that relates to how, I feel, people tend to forget, or perhaps just downplay, that the crux of Mizu's internal conflict and her struggle to survive is due to her being mixed-race.

Because while she can blend in rather seamlessly into male society by binding and dressing in men's clothing and lowering her voice and being the best goddamn swordsman there is, she cannot hide her blue eyes. Even with her glasses, you can still see the colour of her eyes from her side profile, and her glasses are constantly thrown off her face in battle. Her blue eyes are the central point to her marginalisation and Otherness within a hegemonic society. It's why everyone calls her ugly or a monster or a demon or deformed; just because she looks different. She is both white and Japanese but accepted in neither societies. Her deepest hatred of herself stems primarily from this hybridised and alienated identity. It's the whole reason why she's so intent on revenge and started learning the way of the sword in the first place; not to fit in better as a man, but to kill the white men who made her this way. These things are intrinsic to her character and to her arc.

Thus, to refuse to engage with these themes and dismiss the importance of how the representation of her racial Otherness speaks to themes of colonialism and racial oppression just feels tone-deaf to the show's message. Because even if Mizu is a cishet woman in canon, that doesn't make her story any less important, because while you as a white queer person living in the West may feel unrepresented, it is still giving a voice to the stories of people of colour, mixed-race folks, and the myriad of marginalised racial/ethnic/cultural groups in non-Western societies.

#blue eye samurai #mizu blue eye samurai #fandom critical #blue eye samurai meta #wank.mp3 #shut up haydar #fandom.rtf #this is a bit of rant but the prevalent whiteness of fandom in general just gets on my nerves i'm sorry #giving me flashbacks to a:tla fandom fr cuz it's the same shit! people love to devalue the stories of non-white non-western identities #also to be clear i am a southeast asian living in southeast asia and similar to mizu i am often alienated for having mixed ethnic ancestry #and even for speaking english (bcs my granddad served the fuckin. british colonials. so my fam speaks mostly in english) #cuz where im from it's still extremely hegemonic racist patriarchal misogynistic homophobic like the setting in the show #so like even though the story is set in historical japan and may seem far-removed from the experiences of a US or european audience #those of us outside the west and in the global south still face a lot of the struggles that mizu goes through till this very day #so please dont just dismiss that. it feels incredibly tone-deaf #okay rant over

[luxlightly]

Reading comprehension and literary analysis 101: Interpretation vs Intent vs Readings

So, after making my post about the two headed calf poem, there's been pretty extensive argument in the notes about whether or not "all interpretations are valid". The main issue causing the argument is that what we're taught (at least in the American school system, which is what I have the most knowledge of) about "interpretations" is extremely lacking if not outright false. Here, I'm going to break down what an interpretation is and how it differs from author intent, opinion, and "readings".

The first and most important thing to remember about discussion of basically any field of study is that it is meant to have a use. We learn things in the American school system to answer questions on tests, not to utilize the knowledge.

It's a bit like learning how to hold a screwdriver but never being explained that you can use it to tighten screws. You use tools for a purpose, be they physical tools or intellectual. Sure, you could use a screwdriver to hammer in a nail, but it's not going to be as effective and may even hinder your progress.

Literary analysis is also a tool. We use it to extract meaning from works and to expand our understanding of topics, of other people, of ourselves, and of the world around us. An analysis that gives a false impression of these things is, like the screwdriver being used as a hammer, not helpful and even actively hindering.

Understanding that, we should understand these facets of literary analysis, using the short example story.

"Steve eats 10 apples every day. Bob hates Steve."

1: The text

This is the exact words as they appear. Many times, the only thing we are presented with when we read a piece of literature is the text itself. This can limit our understanding significantly.

2: Context

The physical, cultural, emotional, and historical circumstances in which the work was written

3: Intent

What the author, at the time of writing, intended for the audience to understand the piece to mean

4: Interpretation

A deduction about what the piece means, what can be gathered from it, and what significance it has, based on evidence from the text.

5: Reading

A reading is an interpretation of the text through a certain cultural lens (ie: a queer reading, a feminist reading).

6: Opinion

A purely subjective judgement of the quality of a work based on individual preference

So the text of our piece is "Steve eats 10 apples every day. Bob hates Steve."

From only that, we can make any number of interpretations, supported in varying degrees by the text.

Interpretation 1: "Bob doesn't like that Steve eats so many apples." While the text does not directly tell us that Steve's enjoyment of apples is related to Bob's dislike, it's a reasonable jump of logic to make since his eating of apples is mentioned just before the statement about Bob's dislike for him.

Interpretation 2: "Bob hates apples". This is more of a jump from the text than the first, but could still be defended. We know Bob hates Steve and we know Steve eats apples. It could be argued that it's the apples Bob really hates.

Interpretation 3: "Bob likes oranges". This interpretation isn't supported by the text at all. It doesn't help us better understand the text. As a tool, it serves no purpose. Is it "valid" in the sense that you're allowed to believe it's true? Sure. But it doesn't function as the tool it's intended to be and therefore isn't useful to discussion of the piece.

Which brings us to Context.

Let's say this piece was written during the Great Apple Famine where only the very richest people could afford apples and we know the author grew up very poor during this period of time.

This changes how we understand the piece. It would be understood instantly by those reading the piece at the time of writing that Steve must be very rich to afford so many apples. It would not have needed to be stated outright in the text because the context in which it was written was the same in which it was being read.

Knowing that now, it changes what our interpretations may be. Bob may hate Steve because he is wealthy. Bob may hate Steve because he is jealous of his wealth or of the apples themselves. It could be a statement on greed. Or it could still just be about apples. But our toolbox for understanding and gaining meaning from the work has expanded significantly.

Intent:

We rarely get to know exactly what an author's intent for a work is, especially an older work where the author is no longer alive. Many interpretations, therefore, are attempts to understand the author's intent. However, they don't need to be and, in fact, can often be more useful when they are not.

For example, there's an interesting message in our example story about how the excessive displays of wealth of the rich leads to resentment from the less wealthy and how scarcity is a constructed state. These interesting interpretations help us better understand the world and other people.

But let's consider, then, that, shockingly, the author's actual intended message was "Bob likes oranges", something we've established is not evident in the text or particularly useful to discussion of the work. The author is just not good at writing.

In this case, we actually come away with something more meaningful and useful to us when we do not focus on the author's intent. Intent gives us more context for the piece, but is not the end goal of literary discussion.

A reading often entirely and purposefully discards author intent and instead identifies and recontextualizes the text through a specific lens.

For example, let's do a quick religious reading of the text.

"Apples are symbols of original sin in the Christian Bible. We can therefore read Steve as representing one who frequently engages in sinful activity and Bob as being distainful of him for his sinfulness."

It's important to remember that readings like this often are fully aware they are not the intended original meaning of the work. They're just another tool. For example, this reading might help us understand how, even without meaning to, the author may associate apples with sin or negativity. What does that say about the use of that symbolism in our society and how inescapable it is? Or maybe it wouldn't help with that. But the point is that, whether or not it succeeds, it's a tool for better understanding or world and the people in it.

As for opinions, they can't be wrong or right because they are subjective. They aren't judged on any real metric. They can be somewhat helpful in judging a work but ultimately are just a personal feeling. They, unlike interpretation and readings, are not tools for understanding.

So what does this all mean in relation to the two headed cow poem?

If the author's intent is to show how life is precious, even if it's fleeting, does interpreting it as "mankind is cruel to things that are different" really help us in understanding the work and the world around us? If the interpretation contradicts the intent so completely that it's entirely lost, then this new message is what we have to judge and does "mankind is cruel" really tell us anything true about the world or the piece? Or is it just needless pessimism? What does "valid" even mean or matter in the context of literary analysis?

At some point, certain interpretations become counter productive to discussion of the piece. No one can stop you from interpreting something a certain way, but at some point you're using a screwdriver as a hammer and you're just putting holes in the wall.

#long post #lux explains reading comprehension to the piss on the poor website