![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaigouOne of the things that didn't really strike me hard until watching Kekkaishi was an implication that I've seen repeated in plenty of other animanga (and western comics) but never really gave much thought: that girls are, by definition, weaker in every single way.
If we're going to argue that "weakness" is based on a physical standard, then in general it'd probably be relatively true to say that, overall and on average, a woman is "weaker" than a man. (This requires we discount the outliers like "men who spend their days sitting at a desk" contrasted with "women who are Olympic athletes".) If the average height of the American woman is 5-foot-3-inches, and the average height of the American man is 5-foot-11-inches, height and weight and basic build would imply that a man, on average, would probably have more basic strength than a woman when it comes to lifting, shoving, pushing, kicking, and other fundamental ergonomic forms of power.
Coming at it from a former athlete's point of view, I sometimes get annoyed with this simplification, though, because there are different types of strength. There's power -- which is explosive strength: the ability to compress one's muscles and release the compressed power into a single drive. This is the power measured by ergometers (rowing machines). Then there's endurance and stamina, which are a type of strength but one that relies on consistent, long-term, repetitive motion and the ability to continue that motion indefinitely. You can have a lot of explosive power but little stamina, and vice-versa. There's also elastic strength, which is repeated compression and expansion of muscles at rapid pace, like in gymnastics. Someone could do six handsprings without breaking a sweat but still have difficulty moving a washing machine. There are other classifications of strength, but that should be enough to make it clear that we can't simply say that one person is "weak" compared to another person based upon one type of measurement.
Now, in most Western comics, when we talk about superheroes, there seems to be a fundamental assumption that what's powering the hero (or heroine) is, underneath it all, a measurement of physical strength. Catgirl can only get so far against Batman; his larger muscle-mass, height, reach, and explosive power outrank hers, so it appears we have no compunction accepting that in an even fight, he'd eventually have the upper hand. (Again, ignoring outliers like women who've trained extensively in martial arts against men who have not, or who have trained in non-elastic-emphasizing ways.) Hrm, I seem to recall that Wonder Woman even gets outranked a number of times, against male superheroes, and again this has always seemed to me based on the reader's/author's assumption that everything else being roughly equal, a man's strength is ultimately going to be higher than a woman's strength.
Okay, fine. I'm willing to go with that, or at least let it be. Where I find myself stumbling is the question of the source of power: muscular, or... spiritual.
In animanga where there's a supernatural aspect, the source of power is not innate to the person's physical body. It's rooted in something spiritual or supernatural, where the wellspring is within the person but not necessarily on a physical plane. In Naruto, there are fighting styles which capitalize on physical strength, but there are also fighting styles which completely disregard physical strength and use exclusively mental strength (ie genjutsu, I think it's called). In Kekkaishi, the source of power seems to also be a kind of internal wellspring of... something, never clearly defined, but something that acts as a kind of spiritual battery, allowing one to create, manipulate, and control energy. You can find similar assumptions of "power source" in stories like Bleach, Loveless, Yu Yu Hakusho; more on TVTropes' page on Ki Attacks.
I think my first major notice of this motif (of spiritual as source of strength) was in Naruto, because that was the first manga/comic I'd read in which there was even a girl (of the same age) to contrast with the male lead/s. It's muddier in Naruto, though, because of the varying types of fighting styles and the inclusion of things like genetic requirements for certain fighting skills/styles (iow, the ability is tied to the physical, be this inherited from parents or the result of transplant).
Thus, when Kakashi sits Sakura down and gives her the little speech about how she's "not as strong" as her teammates, and thus needs to play to her own strengths (ie technique and finesse and control), I was willing to go along with it. A twelve-year-old girl might be equal in endurance or stamina to her male peers, but as puberty strikes, her muscle mass isn't going to (on average) bulk up quite as much as the boys, so her relative dynamic strength may be less (although her elastic strength may be higher, if she trains in that direction).
And since I had experience myself of being physically (muscularly) weaker than many of my teammates, I knew firsthand that honing your technique can, in the end, make you stronger than someone with greater physical strength and worse technique: because the use of finely-tuned technique allows for better efficiency. Good technique means being able to save your strength, so you can go farther and longer, with less actual output for the results you get. I'm aware it's a bit of a flip to go from that Kakashi-speech to (after the time-skip) Sakura being able to create small earthquakes with a single punch, but it's a valid demonstration of the kind of power one can amass if one is attuned to the use of technique and finesse for the most efficient use of one's power. At least, that's how I was willing to rationalize and/or accept these murkier elements of the Naruto-verse.
Then we get to Kekkaishi, where there's no distinction in styles at all. Both Yoshimori (the hero) and Tokine (his childhood friend) are raised in the same style, use the same ki/internal power source, fight with the same actions and styles. Yet repeatedly, Yoshimori is described as being utterly superlative, power-wise (okay, when he puts his easily-distracted, somewhat-lazy adolescent mind to it), while Tokine is, well... she's weak.
And I suddenly asked: weak, by what standard?
Much like Yu Yu Hakusho, the set-up in Kekkaishi appears to be divorced entirely from physique or muscle. Yoshimori is smaller and lighter than both Tokine and Gin (another fighter, who's part-demon or something like that), yet he can summon up these brute force attacks that surround nearly the entire block with a spiritual barrier. Tokine manages two about an eighth that size, and she's exhausted, while Yoshimori goes on to repeat the action two or three more times without a second thought.
Uhm. Wait. If the spiritual power is grounded in something other than the physical, then on exactly what grounds can anyone argue that a girl, by definition, must be "weaker" than a boy?
What is this source of ki or chi or spiritual power that only boys seem to be able to muster such massive displays of brute force? If the limitations are not solely physical (in which case we might argue, lacking major training, that girls are more likely to demonstrate lesser power than boys of same age and build), then what other limitation could possibly cause the difference in spiritual strength?
That, I think, is where the sexism is hiding, the kind that's possibly far more damaging than the western comics superhero path, where physical strength is often an important facet of the overall strength of the hero or heroine. In animanga where the root source of power is mostly-spiritual or even only-spiritual (as in Kekkaishi, or even D.Gray-man), then there's really no grounds other than simple sexist essentialism to quantify girls as weaker than boys. They're girls, ergo, they're weaker, in all respects.
What exactly does it mean, to have spiritual power, to be able to summon up huge amounts of chakra or chi or ki? Where does this wellspring have its base, and how can we define it, to determine who should, or should not, have power, or even the ability to tap into that power?
One trope is that power can't be harnessed in an untrained state. The first interactions with internal power, it's supposed to be wildly chaotic and almost more destructive than constructive. The hero is likely going to take out a number of small buildings before figuring out how to work with his ability. Overall, AtLA (Avatar: the Last Airbender) manages to overturn a lot of tropes, but it doesn't skip this one -- the first few times Aang goes into the avatar-state, he's nearly so destructive and uncontrollable that he undoes any positive results of entering the state.
I can't think of a single instance in which a girl's first expression of power is at an uncontrollable, more-damage-than-good, level. If boys go from "can't control it" to "learn to handle massive amounts of power", girls are stuck on a different path. For a girl, it's more likely she'll be characterized as somewhat intimidated by what (little) power she does have, or at least very cautious/careful with that power (Sakura, Tokine); either way, she won't be the one tossing small buildings about while she gets a handle on things. But just wait; if the girl does get access to subsequently larger amounts of power/skill, eventually it will naturally consume her and she'll go crazy with it.
See also "Azula, final battle".
(For more about that trope and Azula in particular, again check outsnarp's essay on women and power. That post really should be on TVTropes, if the concept isn't in there already.)
Another trope is that the more experience you have, the greater you can tap into, and the less effort it takes to do so... unless you're the hero. If you're so lucky as to be the (male) hero of the story, then you can probably tap into excessive amounts of energy from very early on, to the amazement and surprise of everyone around you, and you can keep pulling it out of your hat, trying new things that no one's done before just by virtue of pure instinct. (I can see echoes of this "do it your own [unconventional] way" as path to success even in non-fighting shonen-genre like Hikaru no Go, but it's sure all over the place in stories like Kekkaishi, D.Gray-man, Bleach, and similar.)
Note, also, that this "pure instinct" seems to balance on the sword-point of "pure heart"; that trying something no one's done before requires having the sheer heart, somehow. As if believing you can do it meets the requirements for actually doing it. More colloquially, it "matters that much" that somehow, the hero gets it to work -- Allen Walker, Yoshimori and Naruto are cut from classic cloth for this, being relatively straight-forward, affable and gregarious souls who wear their hearts on their sleeves. (Like Sasuke, Ichigo from Bleach always struck me as a little too devious or self-contained to fit that mold. He may be single-minded in his goal, but he's not quite as empathic or devoted-to-others that we'd see him come to a breaking point over his fear for his friends; like Sasuke, he's more likely to respond with anger than anxiety.)
It should come as no surprise that girls follow the "everyone else" rule, where they only get to tap into greater power with less effort if they've been at it for awhile. If a girl is focused entirely and with great emotion to an outcome that's predicated on her ability to tap into her internal power... she's probably going to fail. The demonstration is usually a desperate "please work! please work!" kind of cry, for male or female character, but where the boy gets to demonstrate emotional anguish, the girl seems to just crumble into hysterics. Sometimes accompanied by frustrated crying (cf transitional damsels).
I really think this is all just a jumble of genre conventions that authors don't really give much thought to -- because if they did, they (I hope) would see that when you put it all together, it doesn't make any freaking sense. It's not a coherent set of limitations unless you subscribe to the notion that girls are weaker on all counts than boys, in every way possible and solely because they're girls.
Otherwise, an author might have to raise the question of: why is it that stories repeatedly show girls unable to muster equal amounts of non-physical, willpower-based, internal power -- yet these same supposedly-weak girls can muster massive amounts of healing power? (Yes, Sakura and Ino and Orihime, I'm looking at you.) Wouldn't healing someone's major injuries require a massive tapping-into of power and a major output of power?
We're not talking about physical strength here, after all; we're talking about something internal and intangible that gets translated into tangible by the user -- so the root source would not be defined (one would think) for any particular purpose. You could use eggs to bake a cake, or you could use eggs to make an omelette, or you could toss the eggs at someone's front door -- the egg itself contains the potential for all three but not a limitation of only being for cakes or only being for front doors. It seems reasonable that to pull up, sustain, and deftly control the energy needed for healing, would require someone of significant root-source (to have enough to make a difference) and significant control (to make it go in the right direction) and probably incredible amounts of stamina (to keep at it until the job is done). How can one say, quantitatively or even qualitatively, that this is any less than what the hero's needing to fight his battles?
Underneath it, I'm thinking, the message is basically: girls don't have enough willpower.
Even when the female character is shown as being smarter than her boy-peers (Tokine and Sakura definitely, and probably others but right now I'm going blank) -- there's still something inside her that acts as a limiter. The problem is that the only logical limiter I can see is not due to some essential quality of Being Female. The limitation is solely the author, busy inserting or relying on genre conventions that say "girls can't fight (or, girls can fight but won't win)", even at the cost of internal logic: which means the only logical limiter is due to Being Written Female.
Excuse me, I'm going to go rewatch the first five episodes of Seirei no Moribito to make myself feel better.
If we're going to argue that "weakness" is based on a physical standard, then in general it'd probably be relatively true to say that, overall and on average, a woman is "weaker" than a man. (This requires we discount the outliers like "men who spend their days sitting at a desk" contrasted with "women who are Olympic athletes".) If the average height of the American woman is 5-foot-3-inches, and the average height of the American man is 5-foot-11-inches, height and weight and basic build would imply that a man, on average, would probably have more basic strength than a woman when it comes to lifting, shoving, pushing, kicking, and other fundamental ergonomic forms of power.
Coming at it from a former athlete's point of view, I sometimes get annoyed with this simplification, though, because there are different types of strength. There's power -- which is explosive strength: the ability to compress one's muscles and release the compressed power into a single drive. This is the power measured by ergometers (rowing machines). Then there's endurance and stamina, which are a type of strength but one that relies on consistent, long-term, repetitive motion and the ability to continue that motion indefinitely. You can have a lot of explosive power but little stamina, and vice-versa. There's also elastic strength, which is repeated compression and expansion of muscles at rapid pace, like in gymnastics. Someone could do six handsprings without breaking a sweat but still have difficulty moving a washing machine. There are other classifications of strength, but that should be enough to make it clear that we can't simply say that one person is "weak" compared to another person based upon one type of measurement.
Now, in most Western comics, when we talk about superheroes, there seems to be a fundamental assumption that what's powering the hero (or heroine) is, underneath it all, a measurement of physical strength. Catgirl can only get so far against Batman; his larger muscle-mass, height, reach, and explosive power outrank hers, so it appears we have no compunction accepting that in an even fight, he'd eventually have the upper hand. (Again, ignoring outliers like women who've trained extensively in martial arts against men who have not, or who have trained in non-elastic-emphasizing ways.) Hrm, I seem to recall that Wonder Woman even gets outranked a number of times, against male superheroes, and again this has always seemed to me based on the reader's/author's assumption that everything else being roughly equal, a man's strength is ultimately going to be higher than a woman's strength.
Okay, fine. I'm willing to go with that, or at least let it be. Where I find myself stumbling is the question of the source of power: muscular, or... spiritual.
In animanga where there's a supernatural aspect, the source of power is not innate to the person's physical body. It's rooted in something spiritual or supernatural, where the wellspring is within the person but not necessarily on a physical plane. In Naruto, there are fighting styles which capitalize on physical strength, but there are also fighting styles which completely disregard physical strength and use exclusively mental strength (ie genjutsu, I think it's called). In Kekkaishi, the source of power seems to also be a kind of internal wellspring of... something, never clearly defined, but something that acts as a kind of spiritual battery, allowing one to create, manipulate, and control energy. You can find similar assumptions of "power source" in stories like Bleach, Loveless, Yu Yu Hakusho; more on TVTropes' page on Ki Attacks.
I think my first major notice of this motif (of spiritual as source of strength) was in Naruto, because that was the first manga/comic I'd read in which there was even a girl (of the same age) to contrast with the male lead/s. It's muddier in Naruto, though, because of the varying types of fighting styles and the inclusion of things like genetic requirements for certain fighting skills/styles (iow, the ability is tied to the physical, be this inherited from parents or the result of transplant).
Thus, when Kakashi sits Sakura down and gives her the little speech about how she's "not as strong" as her teammates, and thus needs to play to her own strengths (ie technique and finesse and control), I was willing to go along with it. A twelve-year-old girl might be equal in endurance or stamina to her male peers, but as puberty strikes, her muscle mass isn't going to (on average) bulk up quite as much as the boys, so her relative dynamic strength may be less (although her elastic strength may be higher, if she trains in that direction).
And since I had experience myself of being physically (muscularly) weaker than many of my teammates, I knew firsthand that honing your technique can, in the end, make you stronger than someone with greater physical strength and worse technique: because the use of finely-tuned technique allows for better efficiency. Good technique means being able to save your strength, so you can go farther and longer, with less actual output for the results you get. I'm aware it's a bit of a flip to go from that Kakashi-speech to (after the time-skip) Sakura being able to create small earthquakes with a single punch, but it's a valid demonstration of the kind of power one can amass if one is attuned to the use of technique and finesse for the most efficient use of one's power. At least, that's how I was willing to rationalize and/or accept these murkier elements of the Naruto-verse.
Then we get to Kekkaishi, where there's no distinction in styles at all. Both Yoshimori (the hero) and Tokine (his childhood friend) are raised in the same style, use the same ki/internal power source, fight with the same actions and styles. Yet repeatedly, Yoshimori is described as being utterly superlative, power-wise (okay, when he puts his easily-distracted, somewhat-lazy adolescent mind to it), while Tokine is, well... she's weak.
And I suddenly asked: weak, by what standard?
Much like Yu Yu Hakusho, the set-up in Kekkaishi appears to be divorced entirely from physique or muscle. Yoshimori is smaller and lighter than both Tokine and Gin (another fighter, who's part-demon or something like that), yet he can summon up these brute force attacks that surround nearly the entire block with a spiritual barrier. Tokine manages two about an eighth that size, and she's exhausted, while Yoshimori goes on to repeat the action two or three more times without a second thought.
Uhm. Wait. If the spiritual power is grounded in something other than the physical, then on exactly what grounds can anyone argue that a girl, by definition, must be "weaker" than a boy?
What is this source of ki or chi or spiritual power that only boys seem to be able to muster such massive displays of brute force? If the limitations are not solely physical (in which case we might argue, lacking major training, that girls are more likely to demonstrate lesser power than boys of same age and build), then what other limitation could possibly cause the difference in spiritual strength?
That, I think, is where the sexism is hiding, the kind that's possibly far more damaging than the western comics superhero path, where physical strength is often an important facet of the overall strength of the hero or heroine. In animanga where the root source of power is mostly-spiritual or even only-spiritual (as in Kekkaishi, or even D.Gray-man), then there's really no grounds other than simple sexist essentialism to quantify girls as weaker than boys. They're girls, ergo, they're weaker, in all respects.
What exactly does it mean, to have spiritual power, to be able to summon up huge amounts of chakra or chi or ki? Where does this wellspring have its base, and how can we define it, to determine who should, or should not, have power, or even the ability to tap into that power?
One trope is that power can't be harnessed in an untrained state. The first interactions with internal power, it's supposed to be wildly chaotic and almost more destructive than constructive. The hero is likely going to take out a number of small buildings before figuring out how to work with his ability. Overall, AtLA (Avatar: the Last Airbender) manages to overturn a lot of tropes, but it doesn't skip this one -- the first few times Aang goes into the avatar-state, he's nearly so destructive and uncontrollable that he undoes any positive results of entering the state.
I can't think of a single instance in which a girl's first expression of power is at an uncontrollable, more-damage-than-good, level. If boys go from "can't control it" to "learn to handle massive amounts of power", girls are stuck on a different path. For a girl, it's more likely she'll be characterized as somewhat intimidated by what (little) power she does have, or at least very cautious/careful with that power (Sakura, Tokine); either way, she won't be the one tossing small buildings about while she gets a handle on things. But just wait; if the girl does get access to subsequently larger amounts of power/skill, eventually it will naturally consume her and she'll go crazy with it.
See also "Azula, final battle".
(For more about that trope and Azula in particular, again check out
snarp's essay on women and power. That post really should be on TVTropes, if the concept isn't in there already.)Another trope is that the more experience you have, the greater you can tap into, and the less effort it takes to do so... unless you're the hero. If you're so lucky as to be the (male) hero of the story, then you can probably tap into excessive amounts of energy from very early on, to the amazement and surprise of everyone around you, and you can keep pulling it out of your hat, trying new things that no one's done before just by virtue of pure instinct. (I can see echoes of this "do it your own [unconventional] way" as path to success even in non-fighting shonen-genre like Hikaru no Go, but it's sure all over the place in stories like Kekkaishi, D.Gray-man, Bleach, and similar.)
Note, also, that this "pure instinct" seems to balance on the sword-point of "pure heart"; that trying something no one's done before requires having the sheer heart, somehow. As if believing you can do it meets the requirements for actually doing it. More colloquially, it "matters that much" that somehow, the hero gets it to work -- Allen Walker, Yoshimori and Naruto are cut from classic cloth for this, being relatively straight-forward, affable and gregarious souls who wear their hearts on their sleeves. (Like Sasuke, Ichigo from Bleach always struck me as a little too devious or self-contained to fit that mold. He may be single-minded in his goal, but he's not quite as empathic or devoted-to-others that we'd see him come to a breaking point over his fear for his friends; like Sasuke, he's more likely to respond with anger than anxiety.)
It should come as no surprise that girls follow the "everyone else" rule, where they only get to tap into greater power with less effort if they've been at it for awhile. If a girl is focused entirely and with great emotion to an outcome that's predicated on her ability to tap into her internal power... she's probably going to fail. The demonstration is usually a desperate "please work! please work!" kind of cry, for male or female character, but where the boy gets to demonstrate emotional anguish, the girl seems to just crumble into hysterics. Sometimes accompanied by frustrated crying (cf transitional damsels).
I really think this is all just a jumble of genre conventions that authors don't really give much thought to -- because if they did, they (I hope) would see that when you put it all together, it doesn't make any freaking sense. It's not a coherent set of limitations unless you subscribe to the notion that girls are weaker on all counts than boys, in every way possible and solely because they're girls.
Otherwise, an author might have to raise the question of: why is it that stories repeatedly show girls unable to muster equal amounts of non-physical, willpower-based, internal power -- yet these same supposedly-weak girls can muster massive amounts of healing power? (Yes, Sakura and Ino and Orihime, I'm looking at you.) Wouldn't healing someone's major injuries require a massive tapping-into of power and a major output of power?
We're not talking about physical strength here, after all; we're talking about something internal and intangible that gets translated into tangible by the user -- so the root source would not be defined (one would think) for any particular purpose. You could use eggs to bake a cake, or you could use eggs to make an omelette, or you could toss the eggs at someone's front door -- the egg itself contains the potential for all three but not a limitation of only being for cakes or only being for front doors. It seems reasonable that to pull up, sustain, and deftly control the energy needed for healing, would require someone of significant root-source (to have enough to make a difference) and significant control (to make it go in the right direction) and probably incredible amounts of stamina (to keep at it until the job is done). How can one say, quantitatively or even qualitatively, that this is any less than what the hero's needing to fight his battles?
Underneath it, I'm thinking, the message is basically: girls don't have enough willpower.
Even when the female character is shown as being smarter than her boy-peers (Tokine and Sakura definitely, and probably others but right now I'm going blank) -- there's still something inside her that acts as a limiter. The problem is that the only logical limiter I can see is not due to some essential quality of Being Female. The limitation is solely the author, busy inserting or relying on genre conventions that say "girls can't fight (or, girls can fight but won't win)", even at the cost of internal logic: which means the only logical limiter is due to Being Written Female.
Excuse me, I'm going to go rewatch the first five episodes of Seirei no Moribito to make myself feel better.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 28 Sep 2010 07:45 pm (UTC)I think the issue here is that when the boy powers up, it's an aggressive act, an act of violence, whereas when a girl suddenly develops OMGHEALINGPOWERZxINFINITEEE, it's an essentially nurturing/defensive act - which goes right back to the whole sexism thing of boy = fighter, girl = defender/life-giver.
Now if there were an explanation in the canon that went something like "due to the biological functions of males vs females, females naturally are better attuned to healing energies than males are, while males are more attuned to explosive bursts of power" it would be... kind of sexist anyway, but I could see it making a certain amount of sense on that biological level. But I don't think that the writers think about that, I think it's just somewhere in the back of their head and they don't really examine why that female character is a healer rather than the male, or why their male characters have a habit of going to a new level at the drop of a hat. They just go by instinct (or at least ingrained habit) and do it the way that "makes sense" to them.
no subject
Date: 28 Sep 2010 09:35 pm (UTC)That "what makes sense to them" is exactly what I mean when I say "genre convention" -- it's a series of expectations, assumptions, and basically rules that declare you must do X, have Y, and go Z in this genre. Vampires who walk around in the daytime and aren't susceptible to being staked through the heart and don't even drink blood are, well, not vampires: you're not fulfilling the genre conventions, and unless you've very good (or your audience is particularly gullible), you're probably going to have some confused readers. Same thing would happen if you had a shonen-genre story where the hero has no power, never actually participates in a battle, isn't pushed to the limit, and gets defeated by the big bad... it'd be a pretty crummy story by most fans' standards, because it's going against every genre convention.
This is not to say you can't flip genre conventions (ie, having the blonde bimbo turn out to be an astrophysicist, or the shonen-hero have dreams of growing up to be a patissier) but you can't just ignore all genre conventions, because these conventions also often help define (for readers, and for marketers) what kind of story it is. You do sort of need non-human elements of supernatural or fantasy to be considered urban fantasy, after all, or else you're really just writing a contemporary fiction piece. If you write a story that takes place a hundred years ago, it might be a mystery or a western or a steampunk, but it's probably not Cold War Espionage, y'know?
What disturbs me is that in some ways, genre conventions also have a dark side, because of their nature of being things that we take for granted as definitions of this or that kind of story/world -- we do the exact same thing when it comes to sexism, racism, or homophobia or xenophobia or whatever other ugly part of human nature. There are plenty of people, still, who'll tell you it "just makes sense" that a woman would have kids and stay home to be a mother, or that it "just makes sense" that black men would be better as athletes than white men, or even that it "just makes sense" that Asian kids would have higher math scores or play an instrument better than WASP kids. When authors leave their genre conventions unquestioned, they're doing the same thing -- especially when a lot of those genre conventions contain some pretty racist and sexist and heteronormative crap in there:
-- the boy rescues the girl; the girl doesn't rescue another girl
-- the hero must be hetero-white, though the sidekick can be non-hetero or non-white
-- if the sidekick is gay, s/he will automatically be single, or end up single anyway
-- if the sidekick is non-white, he'll be expected to sacrifice himself on behalf of the white hero at some point
-- if there's a girl, she's the hero's purpose for fighting, or a sacrifice that spurs him to fight harder
-- getting the girl is the ultimate stamp of approval on the hero's actions, ie, the trophy after the win
and so on.
A side-note to the "girls as healers" nonsense (really, have these authors never met a NURSE? they may be healers but all the nurses I've known are NOT nurturers! -- okay, Tsunade's bedside manner is the most nurse-like I've seen in any anime, but she's an exception) -- is that once a girl gets past adolescence and/or attractive-young-woman stage and into middle age or older, then (and only then) does she start to show some really amazing powers. Yu Yu Hakusho's Genki does that, as (we're told) does Tokine's grandmother in Kekkaishi, along with Chiyo in Naruto -- and I think this is because once a female character gets to a certain age, she's more mother than lover (in the eyes of the hero/audience), so it's okay for her to be pretty fierce.
That whole stereotype of the wolf-mother or bear-mother defending her young, and all that jazz, where genre convention says that if a woman has children to defend, she can, and will, be ruthless and vicious and probably take down an entire regiment of heros all by herself. And it's textually seen as okay; not as scary (in the way that a young woman is scary) because, in a nutshell, the older woman's fight is effectively on behalf of the hero -- which means, really, that she remains focused on the hero, but she's just not sexualized in the same focus as the young female character.
Which really reduces all women's fighting skills to "something that is for, by, and about" the hero, yet again. Sheesh.
no subject
Date: 29 Sep 2010 08:43 am (UTC)1. Giving birth.
I don't feel this is a good argument for women's will. Giving birth really doesn't take a very strong will, necessarily. It's a huge effort, and a lot of suffering, often, but it happens willy-nilly. One doesn't have a choice. I was awake for two full days, and in pain for most of 27 hours, and it was bad enough that I made several sincere attempts to tell those with me to euthanise me. I'm proud of how well I did in the whole situation, but one thing it's left me very aware of is that the birth happens without the mother's volition. Her body, and the infant's, do it without needing the involvement of her conscious choice. There are surely countless other examples of women's wills that rely more on things the women have had choices about.
2. Wolf-mother.
Again, I disagree slightly. I think one reason the protectively dangerous older woman is more acceptable is because the overwhelmingly strong protective feelings many women experience when they have children cause *enough women* to act as though it's normal for them to have this set of behaviours that it has influenced our culture. This is one of the few areas we have automatic entitlement in, when it comes to fighting. It's pathetic that we don't get it until we have had a baby, but I don't think it's about the hero. For example, in the final fight in 'Aliens' ("Get away from her, you bitch!"), the mother (Ripley) is certainly not protecting either the hero or a man, but it's a clear case of maternal protective fighting.
3. Have you ever read 'The Dark Angel' series? ('The Dark Angel', 'A Gathering of Gargoyles', and 'The Pearl of the Soul of the World')
If not, and you like YA fantasy at all, I think you might like it. I didn't realise till I'd read it several times, but it breaks most of the conventions you list. The girl rescues a boy and a girl. The hero is coded non-white, although seems mostly hetero. The sidekick doesn't sacrifice herself. The purpose for fighting is survival, and stays that way, despite clear chances to turn it into being all about the love interest. The hero getting the love interest is not the final reward. What I particularly liked was it managed all that, but never felt like it was just rebelling against perceived norms -- it was more that that was how the story went.
4. You are so right about nurses!
no subject
Date: 28 Sep 2010 09:33 pm (UTC)And that would, of course, just beg for the story of how she overcame that out of her pure-hearted focus and determination, and, well, then she'd be the hero. What a concept!
no subject
Date: 28 Sep 2010 10:12 pm (UTC)to clarify: the internal nay-sayer is holding the female character back from what? from being a capable healer, or from being more than just a healer? is the socialization a method to introduce the nay-sayer, even?
Well, it seems like any story in which a character has to face something down and overcome it is a story where that character gets to be a hero. It's just that the only ones doing the facing down and overcoming are, well, boys... as you know as well as I.
no subject
Date: 28 Sep 2010 10:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 28 Sep 2010 09:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 28 Sep 2010 10:10 pm (UTC)It's just easier to compare apples to apples, and I haven't been up for extensive in-depth analysis like what would be required to argue my way around the various argument-to-details or strawmen that would get dredged up in any analysis of more complex works like action/fantasy.
The cultural sexism that says women are no good in fights, are naturally weaker, more likely to be nurturing, can't handle power, not important enough for the main role, etc. is fairly wide-spread.
This is true, but it's not going to stop until we have the tools to delineate exactly where/when it's happening, so that authors can see exactly where they're falling down by relying on sexist tropes. Otherwise, they'll continue to rationalize and argue exception-to-the-rule, just as much as many fans do via apologia.
no subject
Date: 28 Sep 2010 10:13 pm (UTC)Exactly. :\ This happens all the time. And I only know of one male example of this (Tsuna, of Katekyou Hitman Reborn!, who is coded as very feminine in any case) to hold up against the female characters of very nearly every other shounen manga ever.
(Thinking about this stuff makes me love Detective Conan even more -- because, yeah, the guy gets all the spotlight moments, but that's because it's a detective manga and he's the detective. If there's any instance where actual physical ass-kicking is needed, Ran is the one to do it.)
no subject
Date: 28 Sep 2010 11:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 29 Sep 2010 05:13 am (UTC)It's kind of interesting to me thinking about how the same patterns with women play out in JRPGs. They can't be depowered as much as shounen heroines in general, because players want to be able to use their characters and because leveling up with numbers is somehow more acceptable than leveling up through manly training. But the same patterns tend to still fall out. I can't decide which is more irritating, when your level 80 mage capable of killing a dragon with one hit (much less a spell) gets kidnapped to motivate the hero, or when the girl who's been systematically prevented from getting stronger by the author gets kidnapped to motivate the hero.
no subject
Date: 30 Sep 2010 08:15 am (UTC)...Okay, fine. I'm willing to go with that, or at least let it be. Where I find myself stumbling is the question of the source of power: muscular, or... spiritual.
In animanga where there's a supernatural aspect, the source of power is not innate to the person's physical body. It's rooted in something spiritual or supernatural, where the wellspring is within the person but not necessarily on a physical plane...
just that it's easiest to outline the lack of logic when you contrast the physical-base of most superhero comics vs the chi/ki/chakra-base of supernatural/fantasy manga.
This is all tangential to your main point, but I think both american superhero comics and shounen manga are about equal on the assumption that what's powering our heroes is pretty physical. FYI, Chi/ki is based a fair bit on the physical - it's not sectioned off from the body as a concept as cleanly as one normally thinks of with the English "spirit". I mean, there's the chinese medicine conception of different chi in food (or so my mum tuts at me when I eat too much of some particular food, ^^;) or more pertinently for this discussion, the martial arts concept of that through refining control of your body, you refine your ki. So the physical body and the spiritual power are almost inextricably linked; thus exhaustive physical training is pretty much always a necessary precursor to a power-up in shounen manga. The physicality of it is played up quite a bit in Naruto and Bleach - you see all the chakra points are literally rooted into the body in Naruto. And Bleach is ostensibly about a spirit world after the hero gets kicked out of his own body, but look how physical Soul Society is - the shinigami might drift through the physical world's walls, but in their own world everything seems to react about the same (which really doesn't make sense considering some of the world-building, but it would be enormously difficult to make up another whole set of physics and also draw it intelligibly!) Ichigo's spiritual also takes place a further separate plane away from Soul Society - in my view, Soul Society is more supernatural than spiritual, a fairyland under the hill. It's still a very physical place.
I could also argue that American superhero comics on the other hand aren't usually solely based on the physical - in fact the sheer physical power of the heroes has to be explained either by some other power (SCIENCE! MYSTICAL SPIRITS! Sheer brain power, lots of money, or secret government organizations!) but that's just me being petty, because the powers given are normally expressed in a very physical way (claws! fast healing! etc). I would say that's kind of lazy writing, since all these awesome non-body-based powers are either never really examined, or are used in rage-inducing ways (Marvel's House of M, urgh urgh urgh.) But I would argue that your specific example of Batman is powered by his expensive gadgets, and detective skills as much as his strength.
Getting TL;DR ^^;. In short, I agree with you completely, the automatic assumption of weaker in raw physical power -> weaker in every way is far too prevalent in both types of comics D:.
no subject
Date: 30 Sep 2010 08:19 am (UTC)Er, sorry, fail in quick typing there; it should be "Ichigo's spiritual journey also takes place in a separate plane away from Soul Society."
no subject
Date: 1 Nov 2010 08:56 am (UTC)Also, I'm curious, but have you followed the recent developments in Kekkaishi? Because there's also Yoshimori's mother, who's shown to be immensely powerful (though where exactly she falls on the good/evil spectrum is still slightly ambiguous), as well as several other recently-appearing secondary female characters who are shown to be just as powerful as the guys. Interestingly, they're mostly older women (though in Tokine's grandmother's case, she has been hinted as being equally powerful in her youth). Tokine's also developed a pretty cool power lately, but how that's going to play out is still in progress, so I can't really say.
Your points are depressingly valid across the genre though. I would give SO MUCH to see a female example of "overwhelming power that the heroine then must learn to master/control", as opposed to male.
no subject
Date: 2 Nov 2010 04:27 am (UTC)Kekkaishi... well, I'd say the verdict is still out on that one. Reading it over the long haul, it does feel like that mangaka is learning as he goes -- in the sense of learning to use his female characters as thoroughly as his male characters. Yoshimori's mother is definitely totally against the grain of the usual shonen. I mean, if this were your average shonen, she'd be dead. (There seems to be some genre convention that says you can only be an adolescent hero if your mother got stuffed in a fridge when you were still an infant.) Where the anime aligns with the manga, Tokine gets a lot more in the anime than she does in the manga -- an exception that proves my own rule of 'adaptations from one format to another are almost always accompanied by an increase in genderfail (or just increase in the sexism)'. Tokine gets much more agency in the anime than the manga... but where the anime ends, I noticed the manga starts to give Tokine more agency, to the point it even reverses itself in terms of her abilities/limits. (Originally it's posited that Yoshimori and his landlord are something only he can do, and then two volumes or so later, there's Tokine doing the same thing... so either Yoshimori's spirit-dog lied, or the mangaka changed his mind and decided to give Tokine the equivalent. I suspect the latter, myself.)
Honestly, Naruto is the only series I can think of where any girl gets even an iota of the "beaten down to nothing and gets back up again" trope we usually see for shonen heroes. Kishimoto doesn't do it very often (far from often enough by my standards) but he did give that kind of moment of shining glory (or wahtever the trope is called) for Hinata and Sakura in the... whatever those trials were. Graduation-whatever trials. And then again for Sakura when she fights Atasuki with the old lady from Sand. The rest of the time, of course, it's all boys going through that, but Kishimoto at least doesn't shirk from giving girls some kind of moment of awesome. Even if he does then pull the rug out from under them later (demonstrating, to me at least, that he's writing damselfied action girls) -- it's the mangakas who don't even deliver a remote moment of awesome that are writing full-on damsels.
no subject
Date: 2 Nov 2010 06:20 am (UTC)Soul Eater also has an example of absentee (powerful) mom. Maybe it's a growing trend, it'll certainly be a nicer direction than the dead mom one.
Hm, I never watched the Kekkaishi anime so I wouldn't know about the correlations between them, but I'd kind of taken it that after a decent start, Tanabe just happened to have the plot develop in ways that sidelined Tokine for an unfortunately long stretch - but that her plan was always that Tokine would come back in/have a key role eventually. Of course, if she could have been more consistent long the way, that would certainly have been nice, sigh. But what Yoshimori can do with his landlord is entirely different from what Tokine does - Tokine's ability doesn't lie in a "landlord" or alter ego, so it's not really a contradiction there XD (Also, it's kind of debatable how much the Yukimura and Sumimura families let each other know about what they're doing)
Yeah, I remember the chunnin exam arc being one of the better parts of Naruto in terms of having the girls do awesome things, even if they never got to do as much as the boys, but Kishimoto always seems to ultimately sabotage it, which just gets depressing in the longer run.
Actually, Fairy Tail is a shounen series that DOES give the girls crowning moments of awesome on par with the boys, including getting beaten to hell and getting back up. Fairy Tail's especially interesting because there are several girls in the cast who are shown being awesome in different ways (eg. Lucy is a summoner type whose awesome is linked to her empathy with the spirits she summons - a typically feminine approach, but Erza is shown as a knight-type character who is entirely on par with the guys - outranks the main character - in battle capacity and has at least one major battle/moment of awesome every arc to prove it. And other secondary girls are also shown doing their own thing). I think FT actually CONSCIOUSLY goes pokes fun at gender conventions even, given that it once set up a plot arc where all the female characters were taken "hostage" and the male cast had to save them - and about 2 chapters later, said male cast has taken themselves out due to stupidity, and the girls have to bust out and save THEM. It was pretty amazing.