damsel in transition
14 Sep 2010 03:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaigou[ ETA: to clarify a term I frequently use (but may be unfamiliar to some), "animanga" is a portmanteau of "anime" and "manga", meant as a shorthand for "the Japanese illustrated-story publishing/production industries, including manga (graphic novels), illustrated 'light' novels, four-panel comics, animated television shows, animated miniseries/OVA (Original Animation Videos), and animated theatrical releases". Because there's often a great deal of cross-pollination between the two types (printed vs. moving), I tend to use "animanga" to refer to the entire ball of wax in one easy word. ]
We all know (and likely loathe, at least given the posts I see go past from most of you) the damsel in distress: she does something stupid, gets captured/hurt, has to be saved by the hero, and usually ends up clinging to him. I've been browsing some of the manga that readers have classified (on reader-tagging database sites) as "strong female lead" or "strong female character", and I think we need an intermediary.
Something like, "female character damselfied by the author", or "damsel with fighter tendencies," for a less anti-author spin on it.
The so-called "strong female characters" usually go like this: she's relatively outspoken, strong-willed, and ostensibly very good at whatever she does (even if in some stories we never see her do anything, we're at least told she's good). She's independent, and a common expression or thought among the transistional damsel is that she wants to 'stand on her own two feet'. She'll often explicitly state that she intends to fight [the big bad], alongside the hero, as his team-mate or equal. She doesn't see the hero as her rescuer, but as her mentor or her role model (and sometimes as the person she aspires to equal).
Cases in point: Tokine in Kekkaishi, Sakura, Hinato, hell just about any of the female characters in Naruto, Rukia in Bleach, Lenalee in D.Gray-Man, Marie/Soma in Gundam 00, Hilde in Gundam Wing, Kallen in Code Geass. Yet to be determined if Yura (from Nurarihyon no Mago) will fall into this category, as the fight's not done, so there's still chance for her to fall in line.
These are all combatants, btw; I don't think this transitional category applies to civilians, like Winry (of Fullmetal Alchemist) -- as a non-fighter, her most likely means of expression (in a sense, "her way of fighting") is not going to be head-on battle-mode, so it doesn't seem right to measure her by the same standards.
For each of the cases in point (and plenty others but I'm midway through drawer-building and waiting for glue to dry, so keeping this short) -- the introductory pattern, as combatant, is usually as above. Somewhere mid-battle, however, the damselfied combatant is tripped up. One of three things will happen. Either she doesn't have enough spiritual oomph, eg Tokine, Lenalee, and just about every female character in Bleach. Or she doesn't have the will-power/dedication (or alternately, can't overcome her doubt in herself), eg Kallen, Marie/Soma, and Yura (in her earliest fight-scenes). Or the author simply sets her up against fighters who just happen to out-rank her -- Hilde, and nearly every female in Naruto.
Which ultimately amounts to: she still needs to be rescued, but with a twist: she gets mad at herself for ending up in a place that requires the hero rescue her. You can see the differentiation most clearly in Nurarihyon no Mago, actually: Kana is a true damsel in distress, captured, helpless, and waiting anxiously for someone to come save her, and it doesn't even occur to her that she might've, or could've, done anything on her own behalf. Yura, in contrast, is annoyed at needing to be rescued, and determined to do her best to prevent it from happening again.
So what we get is the apparent warrior-woman, trapped in the position of damsel-in-distress (injured, incapacitated, or just plain outranked and unable to contribute to the overall fight), but also consumed by frustration at her position. She invariably rails helplessly against her, well, helplessness, and we're supposed to see this as a fighting spirit, and ignore that basically she was set up to fail. Again and again these transitional damsels throw themselves against someone far stronger, but digging into that observation means realizing that even these so-called warrior-damsels are always set up as weaker in some way, from the get-go. The story's premise either presumes the female character to be weaker (ie Tokine) or undermines the female character enough to destroy her original potential (Sakura, Lenalee).
We're supposed to see the warrior-damsel's determination to fight "against the odds" as bravery... but I can't help but note that in nearly every bloomin' instance, the fight doesn't cause the warrior-damsel to power-up like it does for her fellow (male) character. It just beats her down, and puts her back into the box of needing to be rescued. The only real difference is that we got teased with the possibility that this time, it wouldn't be so, and we got a lot of words from the heroine about how she wants to fight and/or be acknowledged by the hero and/or be equal to the hero in strength -- but the bottom line is that the message in the actual text is that this will never happen. But that's okay! As long as she wishes it might, that makes her strong female, because at least she's not helplessly accepting her damsel position.
Or maybe it just makes her kinda stupid, for entering battles with fighters who out-rank and out-flank her. Or maybe what makes her stupid is signing up for a story with an author who give plenty of lip service among the fan service, but has no intention of actually following through.
ETA: there's another way some authors will handle the "what do I do with the extra chick in the party" question, which is to justify the sabotage as meaningful sacrifice. (The women in Naruto, and Lenalee, get set up for this repeatedly.) The method is this: by some means, the warrior-damsel does take on (and frequently then proceeds to kick serious ass of) a pretty scary big bad -- but in the course of doing so, is either: pushed past her limits and burnt out (Sakura, Tokine), if she's not injured to the point of comatose (thus rendering her not just injured but pretty much a NPC for the rest of the fight, cf Lenalee).
The storyteller's rationalization, as I see it, is thus: every fight must have both a physical climax and an emotional one. The physical, of course, is obvious; the emotional may differ each time. The latter will show up as "what are you fighting for?" or "is this really important enough reason to fight?" or even "do you really have it in you to kill someone?"
A favorite trope of Japanese animanga is the "I fight to protect those precious to me" (well, actually, this is probably a pretty common fight-justification in stories the world over, now that I think about it). If your character is going into a fight and you want emotional conflict along with physical, the lowest-hanging fruit is definitely the "why would you fight this hard?" The character, naturally, will doubt himself suddenly, but hey, look, there! His female teammate fought and gave it her all -- whether now she's injured and rooting for him, or injured and needing his protection (since the author has now rendered her not just badly hurt but also suddenly stupid in terms of any remaining self-defense skills), or just plain out cold. In short, her sacrifice inspires him while at the same time providing an object lesson in "the reason why he fights so hard" -- to protectgirls his friends from going through such pain.
Which I think can have its place in stories, and is certainly a valid point in any action-based bildungsroman, but it gets tiresome when you realize that the sacrifice-and-example is pretty much always played by the action-girl, and frequently it's the only role the action-girl can even play. For all the homoerotic subtext some fans want to see, it's actually not very common to see a male character throw himself head-first against overwhelming odds for the sake of an injured or comatose male team-mate or friend. (The various Gundam series and Naruto are major exceptions, though, which might be why they also subtextually hit a lot of buttons, too, because they capitalize on tropes that are more often male-female in other stories.)
As a footnote to all of the above, one thing I've noticed increasing is the number of mangaka who seem to try and balance "lesser physical power" with "greater ruthlessness". Tokine in Kekkaishi is an absolutely stellar example of this, with absolutely no mercy while her male counterpart is really a softie. Sakura shows major signs of ruthlessness, too, but she's not without some modicum of compassion.
The animanga I recall from the 90s and early aughts, the girl's more likely to be a blowhard about having no sympathy for the enemy, but at the last minute! she can't bring herself to fire! and the hero thus must step in. The updated version is that the girl has no qualms about going for the jugular... if only the author hadn't set up the premise or circumstances to make sure she wouldn't actually have enough muscle/power behind her punch. It's like, well, now she's given the opportunity and guts to shoot -- except the author took all her ammunition away.
All these are just more reasons on the list of why I love Balsa and Gen. Oliva Armstrong so much.
We all know (and likely loathe, at least given the posts I see go past from most of you) the damsel in distress: she does something stupid, gets captured/hurt, has to be saved by the hero, and usually ends up clinging to him. I've been browsing some of the manga that readers have classified (on reader-tagging database sites) as "strong female lead" or "strong female character", and I think we need an intermediary.
Something like, "female character damselfied by the author", or "damsel with fighter tendencies," for a less anti-author spin on it.
The so-called "strong female characters" usually go like this: she's relatively outspoken, strong-willed, and ostensibly very good at whatever she does (even if in some stories we never see her do anything, we're at least told she's good). She's independent, and a common expression or thought among the transistional damsel is that she wants to 'stand on her own two feet'. She'll often explicitly state that she intends to fight [the big bad], alongside the hero, as his team-mate or equal. She doesn't see the hero as her rescuer, but as her mentor or her role model (and sometimes as the person she aspires to equal).
Cases in point: Tokine in Kekkaishi, Sakura, Hinato, hell just about any of the female characters in Naruto, Rukia in Bleach, Lenalee in D.Gray-Man, Marie/Soma in Gundam 00, Hilde in Gundam Wing, Kallen in Code Geass. Yet to be determined if Yura (from Nurarihyon no Mago) will fall into this category, as the fight's not done, so there's still chance for her to fall in line.
These are all combatants, btw; I don't think this transitional category applies to civilians, like Winry (of Fullmetal Alchemist) -- as a non-fighter, her most likely means of expression (in a sense, "her way of fighting") is not going to be head-on battle-mode, so it doesn't seem right to measure her by the same standards.
For each of the cases in point (and plenty others but I'm midway through drawer-building and waiting for glue to dry, so keeping this short) -- the introductory pattern, as combatant, is usually as above. Somewhere mid-battle, however, the damselfied combatant is tripped up. One of three things will happen. Either she doesn't have enough spiritual oomph, eg Tokine, Lenalee, and just about every female character in Bleach. Or she doesn't have the will-power/dedication (or alternately, can't overcome her doubt in herself), eg Kallen, Marie/Soma, and Yura (in her earliest fight-scenes). Or the author simply sets her up against fighters who just happen to out-rank her -- Hilde, and nearly every female in Naruto.
Which ultimately amounts to: she still needs to be rescued, but with a twist: she gets mad at herself for ending up in a place that requires the hero rescue her. You can see the differentiation most clearly in Nurarihyon no Mago, actually: Kana is a true damsel in distress, captured, helpless, and waiting anxiously for someone to come save her, and it doesn't even occur to her that she might've, or could've, done anything on her own behalf. Yura, in contrast, is annoyed at needing to be rescued, and determined to do her best to prevent it from happening again.
So what we get is the apparent warrior-woman, trapped in the position of damsel-in-distress (injured, incapacitated, or just plain outranked and unable to contribute to the overall fight), but also consumed by frustration at her position. She invariably rails helplessly against her, well, helplessness, and we're supposed to see this as a fighting spirit, and ignore that basically she was set up to fail. Again and again these transitional damsels throw themselves against someone far stronger, but digging into that observation means realizing that even these so-called warrior-damsels are always set up as weaker in some way, from the get-go. The story's premise either presumes the female character to be weaker (ie Tokine) or undermines the female character enough to destroy her original potential (Sakura, Lenalee).
We're supposed to see the warrior-damsel's determination to fight "against the odds" as bravery... but I can't help but note that in nearly every bloomin' instance, the fight doesn't cause the warrior-damsel to power-up like it does for her fellow (male) character. It just beats her down, and puts her back into the box of needing to be rescued. The only real difference is that we got teased with the possibility that this time, it wouldn't be so, and we got a lot of words from the heroine about how she wants to fight and/or be acknowledged by the hero and/or be equal to the hero in strength -- but the bottom line is that the message in the actual text is that this will never happen. But that's okay! As long as she wishes it might, that makes her strong female, because at least she's not helplessly accepting her damsel position.
Or maybe it just makes her kinda stupid, for entering battles with fighters who out-rank and out-flank her. Or maybe what makes her stupid is signing up for a story with an author who give plenty of lip service among the fan service, but has no intention of actually following through.
ETA: there's another way some authors will handle the "what do I do with the extra chick in the party" question, which is to justify the sabotage as meaningful sacrifice. (The women in Naruto, and Lenalee, get set up for this repeatedly.) The method is this: by some means, the warrior-damsel does take on (and frequently then proceeds to kick serious ass of) a pretty scary big bad -- but in the course of doing so, is either: pushed past her limits and burnt out (Sakura, Tokine), if she's not injured to the point of comatose (thus rendering her not just injured but pretty much a NPC for the rest of the fight, cf Lenalee).
The storyteller's rationalization, as I see it, is thus: every fight must have both a physical climax and an emotional one. The physical, of course, is obvious; the emotional may differ each time. The latter will show up as "what are you fighting for?" or "is this really important enough reason to fight?" or even "do you really have it in you to kill someone?"
A favorite trope of Japanese animanga is the "I fight to protect those precious to me" (well, actually, this is probably a pretty common fight-justification in stories the world over, now that I think about it). If your character is going into a fight and you want emotional conflict along with physical, the lowest-hanging fruit is definitely the "why would you fight this hard?" The character, naturally, will doubt himself suddenly, but hey, look, there! His female teammate fought and gave it her all -- whether now she's injured and rooting for him, or injured and needing his protection (since the author has now rendered her not just badly hurt but also suddenly stupid in terms of any remaining self-defense skills), or just plain out cold. In short, her sacrifice inspires him while at the same time providing an object lesson in "the reason why he fights so hard" -- to protect
Which I think can have its place in stories, and is certainly a valid point in any action-based bildungsroman, but it gets tiresome when you realize that the sacrifice-and-example is pretty much always played by the action-girl, and frequently it's the only role the action-girl can even play. For all the homoerotic subtext some fans want to see, it's actually not very common to see a male character throw himself head-first against overwhelming odds for the sake of an injured or comatose male team-mate or friend. (The various Gundam series and Naruto are major exceptions, though, which might be why they also subtextually hit a lot of buttons, too, because they capitalize on tropes that are more often male-female in other stories.)
As a footnote to all of the above, one thing I've noticed increasing is the number of mangaka who seem to try and balance "lesser physical power" with "greater ruthlessness". Tokine in Kekkaishi is an absolutely stellar example of this, with absolutely no mercy while her male counterpart is really a softie. Sakura shows major signs of ruthlessness, too, but she's not without some modicum of compassion.
The animanga I recall from the 90s and early aughts, the girl's more likely to be a blowhard about having no sympathy for the enemy, but at the last minute! she can't bring herself to fire! and the hero thus must step in. The updated version is that the girl has no qualms about going for the jugular... if only the author hadn't set up the premise or circumstances to make sure she wouldn't actually have enough muscle/power behind her punch. It's like, well, now she's given the opportunity and guts to shoot -- except the author took all her ammunition away.
All these are just more reasons on the list of why I love Balsa and Gen. Oliva Armstrong so much.
no subject
Date: 25 Sep 2010 09:23 pm (UTC)With Sakura from Naruto I recognize a pattern that I also know from Jim Button: The girl is more intelligent, or at least better educated than the boys, but it turns out that all she has learnt is useless when it comes to real adventures. Boys like the message, as they are normally worse at the kind of education and learning you need to succeed at school, but in the end, the message is detrimental to boys. So, boys may succeed better in manga, girls in RL...
Ah, and we have Karin in Naruto. She does the thinking while Sasuke does the fighting. And Konan is the only character who invested some time into planning before she set out to fight Madara...
You bring up an interesting point when you mention that Kishimoto manages to give the male supporting characters (Lee, Gaara, Shikamaru... ) interesting arcs that don't take away anything from the hero, but he is not able to do this with Sakura. I think that with Sakura there are two problems: She should be more important than Gaara and Lee and Shikamaru - she should be on par with Sasuke, when it comes to importance, or even Naruto himself - and then she would be a real threat to Naruto, just as Sasuke is (a lot of people complain that he has become stronger than Naruto and takes too much "panel time" from him.) But the real problem is probably that Kishimoto is not able to imagine any interesting emotional conflict for a girl that is not linked to a boy. It's only older women who have lost all their loved ones who are ready to sacrifice themselves for their village or the world, as Tsunade or Chiyo do, or now Konan. In Naruto only women who are too old to count as love interests have a chance to be strong fighters.
no subject
Date: 28 Sep 2010 02:23 am (UTC)No, I think it's been around for awhile, as I can recall children's books and YA-genre books with transitional damsels (or some proto-transitional damsels). I think it's more a category that's a logical extension of the way authors play with genre conventions, like trying to flex stereotypes: suddenly the blonde bimbo is just as gorgeous and apparently vapid, but she's vapid with advanced degrees in astrophysics! Ahaha, you can practically hear the author crowing, bet you didn't see that one coming! (The problem is that eventually, this genre-distortion eventually becomes a genre-convention in its own right, done often enough, or done with a strict flip without any real quirks.) So the transitional damsel has been around for awhile.
Maybe it's that people are reading "transitional" as meaning we're moving from damsel --> in-between --> strong female, like some sort of evolution. That wasn't my intended reading; I meant less in terms of literary evolution (as though, eventually, we will have nothing but strong females and no damsels in any stories) and more in the sense that we can't really classify female characters as "only" a damsel or "only" a strong female character. There's this in-between type, that may be on-purpose (for the story's sake) but may also indicate a failing on the part of the author to carry through the genre-cracking to its logical end.
But the real problem is probably that Kishimoto is not able to imagine any interesting emotional conflict for a girl that is not linked to a boy.
I think it's working in the opposite direction: that Kishimoto can't see any reason for a boy to find anything interesting about a girl... unless the girl's interest is focused on the boy. In other words, if a girl likes something more than the boy in question, like, say, soccer or working on cars, then she's not actually all that interesting. Her interest excludes the boy, and the boy -- for Kishimoto, like so many other mangaka -- is the center of the freaking universe. Anything that isn't focused on him, be it a villain or a rival or a teacher or a parent, is pretty much of lesser to null importance.
The characters who are past love-interest point aren't just no longer love interests, too, they're mother figures. And having a strong female mother figure be a fighter is a completely different issue altogether, because if there's one story-niche where women are nearly universally not just acceptable as ruthless but damn near expected to be fierce and ruthless, it's as mothers defending their young. Stories go way back (hell, all the way to Grendel's mother, if you like) in which the mother-figure rises up from the darkness and shows herself three times as bloodthirsty and fearsome as any male on the stage. Normally, this would strike terror into the hearts of the average male viewer (and still does, it appears)... but it's okay! Because this instance, it's a mother defending her children, and that gives her a free pass to get truly brutal.
(Ah, and one thing about Karin -- I heard plenty about how she's the thinker, but when I finally caught up on the manga, it read to me like she sure does a lot of thinking... and Sasuke ignores all of it. His disinterest in her monologue constitutes, to me, the text itself condoning the dismissal of the 'thinker' input/strategy. It's saying: sure, we keep her around because she's smart, but that doesn't mean we actually have to listen to her. She's just a running monologue to explain what's going on to the cabbages in the audience.)
no subject
Date: 28 Sep 2010 07:37 am (UTC)Your point about the mother for whom it is a good thing if she is a strong fighter who fights for your young ones (most of all the hero) and is ready to sacrifice herself for them is interesting. I haven't yet thought about this.
I think in the fifth chapter of "A room of one's own", the chapter where Virginia Woolf discusses her contemporary literature, there's some great insights on the phenomenon. She complains that with modern writers (her contemporaries) there has grown an "I" that overshadows everything. The story is only about the hero/protagonist/author? and no one and nothing else, and that this does not make great literature. Ah, yes, and in this essay we also get some mentioning about two women who are friends and who run a laboratory.
I have just read some of the other comments (I don't have the time to read all of them) and someone suggested that these "transitional damsels" are a step forward. I don't think so - I think they've been around for some time, and I think that if we have a look at the literature of the last 200 years we will find real strong women, and women who start out strong but then are shown their true place, and women who are damsels from the beginning, and I fear that the percentages don't vary, and if they vary, that there is no consistent trend towards strong women.
no subject
Date: 28 Sep 2010 04:01 pm (UTC)But you have to look at such things contextually: who is being framed as holding the "right" of it, or at least as getting the focus of the reader's attention? I read it as Sasuke is getting the lion's share of reader/writer attention, and this attention condones (at the very least) his behavior to some degree. So when he disregards intelligent advice, the text either needs to show us that he suffers for his arrogance (in some way) or present it as clearly his arrogance that's causing the dismissal... but I didn't see that, in their dynamic. I saw her advice, and his arrogant dismissal, with the implication that the cost he'd pay for being arrogant and ignoring her was a minimal cost, if anything. In other words: her advice has such little value (even if it is intelligent) that it can safely be ignored.
That's what I mean by the text contradicting, or reinforcing, subtle messages regardless of what the characters themselves are saying.
Oi, I'm not sure I have time to read all the comments, and I'm fairly certain I've managed to write about half of them! I think I know which comment you mean, though, and it may be the one where I had to clarify myself, to explain that when I said "step forward" I didn't mean in a chronological sense -- as though, in a hundred years, all we'll have are "strong female characters" -- I meant it's a "step forward" from the damsel stereotype itself towards the strong female fighter.
For those writers who grew up with genre conventions of helpless damsels (as I'd be willing to bet that, for the most part, Kishimoto and Kubo and whomever else probably did), to try and flex genre conventions to create a strong female character -- even if they fall short and do a half-assed job that gets them the transitional damsel -- is still a "step forward" in their own personal development. In other words, it's a development of character, maybe even a development of authorial skill, and not some major overall literary trend sweeping us forward.