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: 27 Sep 2010 05:14 am (UTC)Part of the reason this subthread risks becoming a derailment is an aspect of being a fan, and is hardly something wrong; I think it's something we all do, when we particularly enjoy a series. But that enjoyment of, and appreciation for, the story can reduce our objectivity, and make us want to see the story in the best possible light. One way to do that is to argue the details as much as possible -- I know this, I've done it plenty myself -- in hopes of creating a series of exceptions for whatever story of which we're a fan.
I've gone into the archetypes and stereotypes used in GW and the use of female characters as echoes or foils for the male characters in other posts (hrm, I think most of them are on GWanalysis or they're on my journal under the Gundam tag), but to keep it to the point of my post, here, let's stick to Hilde:
1. She appears to be of some rank in a junior/attache quasi-military regiment (like ROTC, I suppose): she deals with new recruits, she carries a side-arm, she's trained in mecha.
2. Her significant appearances in a mecha consist of two events: losing to Duo (when chasing him), and losing to two AI-driven mecha (and being saved by Duo).
3. Her significant contribution to the plot is:
a) she creates a situation where Duo can explain his motivations
b) interacting with her puts Duo in vicinity of mobile suits for stealing/getting away
c) she steals, then delivers, secret information for the good guys to use in battle
We can presume that she must be good at something, for her to achieve that rank, but we never actually see her accomplish anything for her own motivation on-screen, let alone fight a battle and show her skill and win. We could argue that this is because she's only shown in battle against Gundam pilots, and they're supposed to be the best of the best, so of course she'd lose to a Gundam pilot, right? Except the result is that we never see her win. My argument is that no matter what else we might infer from her circumstances and implied abilities, textually, she is set up to fail in the place where the story matters the most -- hell, the two places the story matters the most: she loses her on-screen mecha battles, and she's politically ignorant. She's Duo's foil (representing his idealism, but without his political cynicism), but when she's consistently in the position of having the world/politics explained to her, by Duo. Never the other way around, just as he always gets the best of her (naturally) when it comes to mecha.
It's not that I have an issue with showing someone who is naive or inexperienced, or who loses battles to the superlative good guys, or who is ignorant of political complexities. I have an issue with the fact that this character is almost always female. Series after series after series, we settle for "it's okay, we can rationalize that her victories aren't shown because..." The problem is that I don't see why it's so much to ask for an on-screen victory, and to call out this rationalization as simply. Not. Good. Enough. Anymore.