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kaigouMan, the gender!fail on some of the stuff I've been watching recently... it's like, it's great as long as I just forget that any character has any gender at all, and then I can enjoy the pretty pictures and not have to think about the constant message that girls are weak, that power makes girls crazy, that the only agency it's okay for a girl to have is in the act of choosing her lover (of the opposite sex, natch).
Seeking a break, I went to see what anime's now available since the last time I checked, and wah, two more episodes of Break Blade (sometimes translated as Broken Blade). Yay!
Yes. It's mecha. (What did you expect? This is me, after all.) It's SF with a slight edge of the extra F, at least in terminology (people can operate quartz as a power-source or power-channel; the very rare souls unable to manipulate quartz are known as non-sorcerers). It's political, in that several countries are embroiled in a current war that seems to be heightened due to little-mentioned history (low-key on the exposition, which is actually rather nice). And, being mecha, it's unsurprisingly running about 7:1 on the fanservice, with one of the main female characters getting plenty of screen time in a gauzy cropped (and open) jacket with artfully placed long hair just so.
[Have you ever known anyone with long hair who drapes the hair just so, and for whom the hair will then actually stay like that, instead of falling to either side? Mangakas: it's called gravity and it don't work the way you're drawing. Just sayin'.]
Fine, it's the usual shonen-mecha, but for once the boys don't take up quite so much space.
The background is that the king of Krisna (which given that he's darker-skinned if light-eyed, may be pointing towards southeast-Asia and/or 'Krishna'), the younger brother of the commander-general of Athens, a young female scientist, and a farmer's son all become close friends while at university. Hodr ends up marrying Signe (the classmate-scientist) after graduation, and ascends to the throne despite his egalitarian politics. Zess returns to Athens and marries his childhood sweetheart (and in an unusual move for most mecha, is a lead part but has a two-year old daughter). Rygalt returned to his father's farm and has been eking out an scrabble existence with his little brother. Now war's broken out between Athens and Krisna, and Hodr calls Rygalt to the capital in hopes that a mysterious mecha -- that no one can operate -- might be operable by the one person who can't actually operate any of the world's quartz-based machinery.
Oh, and none of the main characters are fifteen. They're in their mid-twenties; the rest of the characters are that age or older. Among the Athens mecha-pilots, there are younger (all the way down to 12) pilots, but so far the youngest have all been female. I'm not sure exactly why the story pulls them specifically out of the fighting (or if the mangaka even ever interrogated his reasons for doing so), but it is noticeable that it's age/youth getting sidelined instead of gender/female. That is, if a character is older than early 20s and a combatant, they'll end up on the battlefield, so I'm guessing it's the mangaka just wanting the really young ones out of the way. Not sure, but I still appreciate the notion of main characters who've already done the puberty thing.
Our anti-hero, Zess, leads a team of four: two men, two (much younger) women. One of the two women is a vicious and skillful fighter, and she takes out a number of the good guys' mecha. She only goes down thanks to coming up against Rygart's (unfamiliar, non-quartz-powered) mecha, and since Rygart's the hero, she's going down. That's a given, since that's part of the hero contract... but she doesn't go down by making stupid mistakes, and she doesn't go down because she loses her nerve, and she doesn't go crazy on her way down. She's treated as an excellent soldier who's caught off-guard by a completely unfamiliar mecha with unexpected skills, and the hero's luck undoes her luck. She also, notably, makes her own choice as to how she eventually goes down.
Her counterpart is (here we go again with the crazy ages) only 12, but drawn like Jessica Rabbit -- and can't hit the broad side of a barn from four feet away. I was writing her off as the buxom ditz who's contributing absolutely jack to the team (and starting to think Zess was a real idiot for choosing her) -- until she also gets her moment of crackerjack acrobatic awesome. Okay, so Cleo ends up a POW, but I thought about the circumstances. The captain (Zess) has been incapacitated by Rygart's full-throttle mech-attack, and his second orders Cleo to retreat on her own and get word to the main army.
Normally, that's what I'd expect: Cleo would fuss, argue, but go, and the (male) second would sacrifice himself valiantly for Cleo to get the captain away from the field. Except Cleo refuses, and heads into the field herself, to be the distraction. Could we count this as female being sacrifice for a male character's benefit? Maybe. But seeing how often it's the girl-fighter who's sent away from the battlefield -- to take care of the wounded, to alert someone else, to just plain hide -- and after all the cracks about Cleo's inability to hit any target at all -- it's awfully nice to see a sterling several moments of total awesome from her.
(I don't believe she actually kills anyone. I think she simply wrecks their suits, which if you think about it, achieves the same end, in that they're not going to be contributing to the battle. Given that she's supposed to be considerably younger -- if a complete genius-prodigy in handling the team's experimental mecha-types -- I'm willing to let it go on the whole not-killing thing. The nerves I didn't have to accept in Cleo's more battle-hardened team-mate, I'll accept in Cleo.)
Besides, on the side of the good guys, there's Captain Narvi, who bears a striking resemblance to Yoruichi (from Bleach), but she's everything Yoruichi never gets to be. She's not just captain-in-name; she's shown in battle several times, taking out enemy-mecha both skillfully and with a complete lack of hysteria or power-crazed wigginess. She clearly demands the respect of her fellow soldiers and those under her command. She's promoted by the 4th episode (same as vol 4 of the manga) to leading her own specialist team -- who are all male (including her own elder brother, and the main hero). We see her supervising Rygart's training... and when she decides he needs more experience in hand-to-hand with the mecha, she brings in Captain Sakura.
The anime is covering an entire volume per one-hour mini-OVA, so you only see a quick flash of Sakura training Rygart. She gets more time in the manga, where she's older (Rygart mumbles something about her being an obaasan!), skilled, and lays Rygart out flat instantly. Oh, and while Sakura may be older -- there are subtle lines around her eyes, for instance -- she's not drawn as the gap-toothed and ugly bordering-on-magical crone (cf that old biddy in Naruto), nor is she drawn as artificially younger (cf Tsunade's artifice, also in Naruto). She's taller than Rygart, stronger, faster, smarter, and more knowledgeable; the text treats her as an expert trainer who deserves -- and gets -- respect from the men under her command.
It's really too bad the anime is moving so fast... but then, the fan service in the manga is only about 4:1, so this may be another instance of The Dog's Law of Over-sexualized Adaptations. Cut out Sakura except for a brief flash, and change the main female lead's obvious bra-like wear (and rather well-covering bra at that) into a gauzy, hanging-open, cropped shirt. That said, there are so many female characters -- especially on the battlefield -- that I suppose the illustrators realized they couldn't get rid of all of them, not without radically altering a lot of the original text. There are female characters as guards in the palace, as engineers working with the Queen, as pilots in mecha (with successful kills shown on-screen). There are actually a lot of female characters in the foreground, and the manga also names a lot of them, too.
Actually, come to think of it, the only time I've seen an animated show where you can expect a woman on-screen (in battle situation) as often as a man was in AtLA. Break Blade doesn't have nearly as many female foot-soldiers (basic mecha pilots), proportionally, as AtLA had in the Fire Nation, but it does have a decently high proportion of female characters in command positions. And not just "the brains behind it" in the way that Gundam likes to position its female support staff; these are women in command positions leading the charge.
A lot of these women characters also die. Hell, a lot of the male characters die. (It is supposed to be war, after all.) What I realized is that if you take the average mecha-storyline, and you think of a situation -- up against the bad guys who are just out of range, and one team volunteers to do a berserker frontal attack -- you would totally expect the (male) characters to end up as a whole lot of red shirts. What the male characters get ain't what the female characters get, not in most mecha.
Options for female characters biting the dust: the ship or command center gets hit and things explode and she's taken out along with her support staff. Or, she heads into battle and gets hit by shrapnel and/or stray gunfire, almost always before she's even had a chance to fire. (I think we're supposed to see her as heroic for just plain heading into battle, and not expect her to, y'know, actually do anything other than be female and be in a ten-mile radius of a battle. Or something.) Or, she heads into battle and if we're lucky and she doesn't wig out completely and effectively sabotage her own ability to do jack, then she'll miss everyone she fires at, and she'll end up incapacitated and requiring one of her second-in-commands to come rescue her ass and tow her out of there.
By that point, I really don't care if she rails against her inability to fire/retaliate. I'm too busy railing against the mangaka/animators for giving me the same crap all over again. Have these people never seen Terminator 2? Or Alien? or even met any nurses? Because women are perfectly capable of being pretty damn cold-blooded and ruthless. Honestly, can we kill the women-with-power-go-crazy trope already?
Now, imagine the scenario if all the characters were male. I'm sure you can, if you've seen enough mecha-storylines. Now, replace about every other commanding officer with a clearly female character design... but don't change anything else. Same in-battle involvement, same taking-out-of-bad-guys, same respect from underlings and command-presence, same price paid when things go wrong.
This is not to say that all the female characters avoid the usual pitfalls. Niko, one of the opposing forces' mecha-pilots, is a vicious and skilled pilot... who abruptly puts on the uber-moe act when she's out of the mecha. I'm not sure whether this is meant to highlight how many other female characters who don't play that game -- including Cleo -- or whether Niko is meant as the moe-sop for any fanboys wondering why the girls aren't all playing cute. Either way, Niko still shows a high kill-rate and no sign of going wacko from the powah.
Also, lest I be giving the wrong impression, the story is focused squarely on the three main characters: Zess, Hodr, and Rygart -- and the majority of the significant players in the military are also male. But at least there are female characters, who don't exist solely for window-dressing, damsel-rescuing, or support staff positions. So, mostly shonen, but with a side-order of female combatant strength, too.
The fact that the main female lead, Queen Signe, is an incredible scientist and engineer... almost becomes an after-thought once I realized how many female military characters there are. The female character as the brains of the operation, yeah, I've seen that one plenty. Eventually it does feel almost like a consolation prize, of some sort: if you had power of life and death via mecha, you'd go bonkers from the power, but you can at least tell other people (read: guys) what to do with their power of life and death! Which is great, but it's a glass ceiling in the world of mecha, because the support staff are never (or hardly ever) the heroes of the piece. They risked life and death, but not their own, not really.
So having Signe be the genius engineering-brains isn't all that unusual; she's definitely a non-combatant (and she's also the object of about 90% of the for-guys fan service). This isn't to say I have an issue with non-combatants. I'd probably have a lot less issue with the female character as command-from-afar, as strategist, as engineer, or even as healer, if that were balanced out with plenty of women in other positions, like enlisted mecha-grunt, or jet fighter pilot, or even (woah) one of the regular army down on the ground, at the front lines. Then, the "female character as brilliant backup" wouldn't feel like such a consolation prize at all, because it's reflecting the presence of choices/options for female characters, just as it does for male characters. If "brilliant backup" is the only option, that's not an option at all.
When I look at all that... I'm willing to forgive the superfluous fan service. Still wish the mangaka would up the male-character fan service, but 1 is better than 0, I suppose. As long as I keep getting so many moments of crowning kick-ass from female characters, I can live with 7:1 of panty-shots and cleavage vs bare chest.
Seeking a break, I went to see what anime's now available since the last time I checked, and wah, two more episodes of Break Blade (sometimes translated as Broken Blade). Yay!
Yes. It's mecha. (What did you expect? This is me, after all.) It's SF with a slight edge of the extra F, at least in terminology (people can operate quartz as a power-source or power-channel; the very rare souls unable to manipulate quartz are known as non-sorcerers). It's political, in that several countries are embroiled in a current war that seems to be heightened due to little-mentioned history (low-key on the exposition, which is actually rather nice). And, being mecha, it's unsurprisingly running about 7:1 on the fanservice, with one of the main female characters getting plenty of screen time in a gauzy cropped (and open) jacket with artfully placed long hair just so.
[Have you ever known anyone with long hair who drapes the hair just so, and for whom the hair will then actually stay like that, instead of falling to either side? Mangakas: it's called gravity and it don't work the way you're drawing. Just sayin'.]
Fine, it's the usual shonen-mecha, but for once the boys don't take up quite so much space.
The background is that the king of Krisna (which given that he's darker-skinned if light-eyed, may be pointing towards southeast-Asia and/or 'Krishna'), the younger brother of the commander-general of Athens, a young female scientist, and a farmer's son all become close friends while at university. Hodr ends up marrying Signe (the classmate-scientist) after graduation, and ascends to the throne despite his egalitarian politics. Zess returns to Athens and marries his childhood sweetheart (and in an unusual move for most mecha, is a lead part but has a two-year old daughter). Rygalt returned to his father's farm and has been eking out an scrabble existence with his little brother. Now war's broken out between Athens and Krisna, and Hodr calls Rygalt to the capital in hopes that a mysterious mecha -- that no one can operate -- might be operable by the one person who can't actually operate any of the world's quartz-based machinery.
Oh, and none of the main characters are fifteen. They're in their mid-twenties; the rest of the characters are that age or older. Among the Athens mecha-pilots, there are younger (all the way down to 12) pilots, but so far the youngest have all been female. I'm not sure exactly why the story pulls them specifically out of the fighting (or if the mangaka even ever interrogated his reasons for doing so), but it is noticeable that it's age/youth getting sidelined instead of gender/female. That is, if a character is older than early 20s and a combatant, they'll end up on the battlefield, so I'm guessing it's the mangaka just wanting the really young ones out of the way. Not sure, but I still appreciate the notion of main characters who've already done the puberty thing.
Our anti-hero, Zess, leads a team of four: two men, two (much younger) women. One of the two women is a vicious and skillful fighter, and she takes out a number of the good guys' mecha. She only goes down thanks to coming up against Rygart's (unfamiliar, non-quartz-powered) mecha, and since Rygart's the hero, she's going down. That's a given, since that's part of the hero contract... but she doesn't go down by making stupid mistakes, and she doesn't go down because she loses her nerve, and she doesn't go crazy on her way down. She's treated as an excellent soldier who's caught off-guard by a completely unfamiliar mecha with unexpected skills, and the hero's luck undoes her luck. She also, notably, makes her own choice as to how she eventually goes down.
Her counterpart is (here we go again with the crazy ages) only 12, but drawn like Jessica Rabbit -- and can't hit the broad side of a barn from four feet away. I was writing her off as the buxom ditz who's contributing absolutely jack to the team (and starting to think Zess was a real idiot for choosing her) -- until she also gets her moment of crackerjack acrobatic awesome. Okay, so Cleo ends up a POW, but I thought about the circumstances. The captain (Zess) has been incapacitated by Rygart's full-throttle mech-attack, and his second orders Cleo to retreat on her own and get word to the main army.
Normally, that's what I'd expect: Cleo would fuss, argue, but go, and the (male) second would sacrifice himself valiantly for Cleo to get the captain away from the field. Except Cleo refuses, and heads into the field herself, to be the distraction. Could we count this as female being sacrifice for a male character's benefit? Maybe. But seeing how often it's the girl-fighter who's sent away from the battlefield -- to take care of the wounded, to alert someone else, to just plain hide -- and after all the cracks about Cleo's inability to hit any target at all -- it's awfully nice to see a sterling several moments of total awesome from her.
(I don't believe she actually kills anyone. I think she simply wrecks their suits, which if you think about it, achieves the same end, in that they're not going to be contributing to the battle. Given that she's supposed to be considerably younger -- if a complete genius-prodigy in handling the team's experimental mecha-types -- I'm willing to let it go on the whole not-killing thing. The nerves I didn't have to accept in Cleo's more battle-hardened team-mate, I'll accept in Cleo.)
Besides, on the side of the good guys, there's Captain Narvi, who bears a striking resemblance to Yoruichi (from Bleach), but she's everything Yoruichi never gets to be. She's not just captain-in-name; she's shown in battle several times, taking out enemy-mecha both skillfully and with a complete lack of hysteria or power-crazed wigginess. She clearly demands the respect of her fellow soldiers and those under her command. She's promoted by the 4th episode (same as vol 4 of the manga) to leading her own specialist team -- who are all male (including her own elder brother, and the main hero). We see her supervising Rygart's training... and when she decides he needs more experience in hand-to-hand with the mecha, she brings in Captain Sakura.
The anime is covering an entire volume per one-hour mini-OVA, so you only see a quick flash of Sakura training Rygart. She gets more time in the manga, where she's older (Rygart mumbles something about her being an obaasan!), skilled, and lays Rygart out flat instantly. Oh, and while Sakura may be older -- there are subtle lines around her eyes, for instance -- she's not drawn as the gap-toothed and ugly bordering-on-magical crone (cf that old biddy in Naruto), nor is she drawn as artificially younger (cf Tsunade's artifice, also in Naruto). She's taller than Rygart, stronger, faster, smarter, and more knowledgeable; the text treats her as an expert trainer who deserves -- and gets -- respect from the men under her command.
It's really too bad the anime is moving so fast... but then, the fan service in the manga is only about 4:1, so this may be another instance of The Dog's Law of Over-sexualized Adaptations. Cut out Sakura except for a brief flash, and change the main female lead's obvious bra-like wear (and rather well-covering bra at that) into a gauzy, hanging-open, cropped shirt. That said, there are so many female characters -- especially on the battlefield -- that I suppose the illustrators realized they couldn't get rid of all of them, not without radically altering a lot of the original text. There are female characters as guards in the palace, as engineers working with the Queen, as pilots in mecha (with successful kills shown on-screen). There are actually a lot of female characters in the foreground, and the manga also names a lot of them, too.
Actually, come to think of it, the only time I've seen an animated show where you can expect a woman on-screen (in battle situation) as often as a man was in AtLA. Break Blade doesn't have nearly as many female foot-soldiers (basic mecha pilots), proportionally, as AtLA had in the Fire Nation, but it does have a decently high proportion of female characters in command positions. And not just "the brains behind it" in the way that Gundam likes to position its female support staff; these are women in command positions leading the charge.
A lot of these women characters also die. Hell, a lot of the male characters die. (It is supposed to be war, after all.) What I realized is that if you take the average mecha-storyline, and you think of a situation -- up against the bad guys who are just out of range, and one team volunteers to do a berserker frontal attack -- you would totally expect the (male) characters to end up as a whole lot of red shirts. What the male characters get ain't what the female characters get, not in most mecha.
Options for female characters biting the dust: the ship or command center gets hit and things explode and she's taken out along with her support staff. Or, she heads into battle and gets hit by shrapnel and/or stray gunfire, almost always before she's even had a chance to fire. (I think we're supposed to see her as heroic for just plain heading into battle, and not expect her to, y'know, actually do anything other than be female and be in a ten-mile radius of a battle. Or something.) Or, she heads into battle and if we're lucky and she doesn't wig out completely and effectively sabotage her own ability to do jack, then she'll miss everyone she fires at, and she'll end up incapacitated and requiring one of her second-in-commands to come rescue her ass and tow her out of there.
By that point, I really don't care if she rails against her inability to fire/retaliate. I'm too busy railing against the mangaka/animators for giving me the same crap all over again. Have these people never seen Terminator 2? Or Alien? or even met any nurses? Because women are perfectly capable of being pretty damn cold-blooded and ruthless. Honestly, can we kill the women-with-power-go-crazy trope already?
Now, imagine the scenario if all the characters were male. I'm sure you can, if you've seen enough mecha-storylines. Now, replace about every other commanding officer with a clearly female character design... but don't change anything else. Same in-battle involvement, same taking-out-of-bad-guys, same respect from underlings and command-presence, same price paid when things go wrong.
This is not to say that all the female characters avoid the usual pitfalls. Niko, one of the opposing forces' mecha-pilots, is a vicious and skilled pilot... who abruptly puts on the uber-moe act when she's out of the mecha. I'm not sure whether this is meant to highlight how many other female characters who don't play that game -- including Cleo -- or whether Niko is meant as the moe-sop for any fanboys wondering why the girls aren't all playing cute. Either way, Niko still shows a high kill-rate and no sign of going wacko from the powah.
Also, lest I be giving the wrong impression, the story is focused squarely on the three main characters: Zess, Hodr, and Rygart -- and the majority of the significant players in the military are also male. But at least there are female characters, who don't exist solely for window-dressing, damsel-rescuing, or support staff positions. So, mostly shonen, but with a side-order of female combatant strength, too.
The fact that the main female lead, Queen Signe, is an incredible scientist and engineer... almost becomes an after-thought once I realized how many female military characters there are. The female character as the brains of the operation, yeah, I've seen that one plenty. Eventually it does feel almost like a consolation prize, of some sort: if you had power of life and death via mecha, you'd go bonkers from the power, but you can at least tell other people (read: guys) what to do with their power of life and death! Which is great, but it's a glass ceiling in the world of mecha, because the support staff are never (or hardly ever) the heroes of the piece. They risked life and death, but not their own, not really.
So having Signe be the genius engineering-brains isn't all that unusual; she's definitely a non-combatant (and she's also the object of about 90% of the for-guys fan service). This isn't to say I have an issue with non-combatants. I'd probably have a lot less issue with the female character as command-from-afar, as strategist, as engineer, or even as healer, if that were balanced out with plenty of women in other positions, like enlisted mecha-grunt, or jet fighter pilot, or even (woah) one of the regular army down on the ground, at the front lines. Then, the "female character as brilliant backup" wouldn't feel like such a consolation prize at all, because it's reflecting the presence of choices/options for female characters, just as it does for male characters. If "brilliant backup" is the only option, that's not an option at all.
When I look at all that... I'm willing to forgive the superfluous fan service. Still wish the mangaka would up the male-character fan service, but 1 is better than 0, I suppose. As long as I keep getting so many moments of crowning kick-ass from female characters, I can live with 7:1 of panty-shots and cleavage vs bare chest.