#WHAT IF HE WAS NOT REALLY A SAMURAI

[kurp-stuff]

Ugh i left another lengthy reply under a comment about the assassin's creed shadows announce on youtube. I swear this shit is getting me mad.

[clownowo]

I think that if Miles Edgeworth were to ever have a Tumblr blog it would be entirely Steel Samurai based with a carefully organized tagging system. He posts lengthy formally worded analysis about Steel Samurai and nothing else. He doesn't check his notes. He does check his asks, because they're kind of like emails. He has anon asks and dms turned off. Someone sends an ask about his interests outside of Steel Samurai and he immediately blocks them. He doesn't have pronouns or a name to be called by in his bio. The only hint about Edgeworth's personal life is that when he refers to the death of Jack Hammer or the conviction of Matt Engarde he only refers to Phoenix as "that man".

Maya definitely has a tumblr and it has a canon Pink Princess url. She actually hoarded a bunch of Pink Princess urls long before the character was officially announced because she knew she needed to have them. Her tumblr header is "the real pink princess ask sal manella". Her pinned post has these

[ID: Two blinkie banners. The first has a lesbian flag background and says "Pink Princess is canonically gay." The second is light pink and says "PinkSteel shippers dni". End ID] (thank you @princess-of-purple-prose)

Maya follows him and sends Edgeworth asks periodically. He thinks she's a wonderful conversationalist. He has no idea of her identity. Maya is fully aware he's Edgeworth.

[stromblessed]

Mizu's spectacles, and the levels of her disguise

In drafting some more Blue Eye Samurai meta posts, I find myself writing out the comparisons between what Mizu can and cannot hide about herself, and how that affects how she moves through the world.

Like, I get the jokes about Mizu's glasses, if only color contacts had existed back then, etc. etc., and I think (hope) that most viewers don't take the glasses jokes seriously, as in "I don't care about the suspension of disbelief because BES is a cartoon." But I wanted to write these thoughts out anyway without burying them in a text post about something else.

I think the points I'm going to lay out here are viewed very differently by different people, so please feel free to add to this post, reply, or put your thoughts in the tags!

Not only do Mizu's glasses not actually help her that much, there's surely more to Mizu's mixed race appearance than just the color of her eyes.

In my view, this was pointed out in episode 1:

I'm willing to bet most of us were expecting young Taigen to say "blue eyes," not "ROUND eyes."

Obviously this is still about Mizu's eyes, but not even spectacles can hide their shape.

I don't think the show is obligated to point out everything about Mizu's face that isn't quite as Japanese as the people around her expect. Though the creators have said that they specifically designed Mizu - and her clothes - to read both as "white" and as "Japanese," as well as both male and female. I think there's more about Mizu's features that read as "white" than just her eyes.

This is where my own headcanons start entering the picture, but it's my impression that people can just tell that Mizu looks different, whether or not they can put a finger on exactly how.

There's the little girl who looks at Mizu and then hides on the way into Kyoto:

When there's more to your face you'd like to cover up than just your eyes, big hats are a big help!

By the way, most of these examples have to come from the first half of the season, since by the second half, either Mizu is too preoccupied with fighting henchmen, or everyone Mizu is facing knows who she is already, and she therefore has no reason to hide her mixed race identity.

It's worth mentioning that the mere fact that Mizu has to hide multiple aspects of her identity - her mixed race and her sex - results in her having to choose clothes that really, really cover her up, which doesn't win her any favors either:

(Zatoichi reference, anyone?)

If it were as easy as, for example, tying her glasses to her head and wa-lah, nobody would ever know she was half-white - then (1) Mizu would've just done that long ago, and (2) Mizu wouldn't be so on guard and on tenterhooks 100% of the time the way she's depicted in the show, even when her glasses are on.

Her spectacles sure don't help her in the brothel, which is full of observant women who are trying to seduce her, meaning they get good long looks at her:

Mizu never takes her glasses off, but they still send a woman to her who has light eyes, thinking that must be what will interest a blue-eyed man:

No wonder Mizu gets mad after this, lol

So Mizu never takes her spectacles off in the brothel, it's dimly lit inside, and the women can still tell that she has blue eyes. I'm getting the sense that Mizu putting on her spectacles isn't a guarantee that people suddenly can't tell that she looks different.

And yet no one spots that she's female.

Mizu can hide her breasts, can wear her hair in the right style, can hide what's between her legs, can walk and talk and behave like a man - and she's been doing it for almost her entire life, to the point that not only is she very good at it, but the threat of being found out as female is deadly, but isn't presented in the show as omnipresent.

Let me explain.

She threatens Ringo for nearly saying the word "girl" out loud, because while she's constantly ostracized for being mixed race, being a woman traveling without a chaperone, carrying a sword, and disguised as a man will get her killed or flogged or arrested or some combination of these things.

But in addition, it's been drilled into her since she was a child that if she is discovered as female, the combination of her being mixed race and female will identify her as someone extremely specific, someone known to some bad people, and she will be killed:

I think of it as Mizu thinking to herself, "Being found out as mixed race means I'm treated badly. Being found out as mixed race and a woman means I'm dead."

Mizu's hair is cut as a child. But she isn't made to wear a big hat, or cover her eyes somehow, or anything like that. Because hiding her sex is a more successful endeavor than hiding her race.

Ringo finds out she's female by accident, but once Mizu accepts the fact that he won't rat her out, she relaxes pretty early on in the season. Because the threat of being found out as female is mitigated pretty much 99.9%, since Mizu has gotten so good at being a man. And also, because most of the time, people see what they want to see. Even if Mizu's face makes her stand out as "not 100% Japanese," no one in the world of BES looks at Mizu's clothes, her bearing, her sword, hears her voice, and will ever in a million years conclude that she is a woman, because expectations around gender roles in the Edo period were so rigid and so widely enforced.

One detail that proved this to me is after the Four Fangs fight:

Ringo takes off Mizu's clothes so he can stitch her up, then leaves her clothes off even after he's done. He doesn't even throw her cloak over her as a blanket or anything. There's a little a straw (pallet?) as a divider there on the left, but anyone could just peek around it and see Mizu and her chest bindings. (I think it's mostly there as a windbreaker.)

And Taigen is right there, but he doesn't give a shit:

Opinions probably vary hugely on this, but my impression is that because the show doesn't make any kind of deal about Taigen being in the room with Mizu here, my guess is that Mizu isn't in any danger of Taigen thinking she's female. Even when I watched the show for the first time, I assumed that Taigen had seen Mizu out of her clothes here, and that he thought nothing of it.

Eat your heart out, Li Shang (Mulan 1998). I actually do think that this scene is a direct and purposeful side-eye to that movie, lol

There's obviously some nuance to how "severe" being mixed race is compared to how "severe" being a woman is for Mizu:

After all, Swordfather can't bear to listen to Mizu confess to being a woman.

So a Japanese man can go wherever he wants, whenever he wants in BES. A Japanese woman has limited options: marriage, religion, or a brothel. A mixed-race man is an eyesore in this story. A mixed-race woman is a death sentence.

May as well eliminate the female aspect, and do what you can about the mixed-race aspect. Because that's just realistic.

Meaning Mizu can avoid the strictures Edo society places on women. But she can't avoid the repercussions that come with being mixed race. And I truly don't think that it's just because "there's no brown contacts yet."

[radaverse]

what if they met way before they did

the baby

[loptrcoptr]

The blue eye samurai fandom, for some reason

[otogariado]

the ending of blue eye samurai with taigen and akemi is so good. akemi starts the show off by fighting so desperately for her happiness, trying to keep her engagement with taigen, and ends it with making the decision to seize the power she wants for herself, to give herself her own freedom she's been denied by the men who want to control her all her life (whether ill intentioned or not). taigen spends most of the show proclaiming mizu stole his honour—his greatness—and therefore he must get it back, to keep his engagement with akemi. but by the end of it he tells akemi all he wants is to be happy; that he does not need greatness. but akemi has had enough, and she does not want to run; she wants greatness, and maybe with that greatness will come her own freedom and her true happiness.

i love a good old switcheroo, with the conflict of interest made even more interesting because taigen and akemi are supposed to be lovers.

[thaliajoy-blog]

Now I have some thoughts about Madame Kaji. She sure is an aide to Mizu in her quest and has a certain benevolence, but she's clearly also a very flawed character, in part because of the society she lives in. She does own and runs a brothel, and that does involve having a part in the exploitation of young poor women we clearly see happening in the series. She buys young women and gets them to do sex work (and boys too apparently) ; in fact she runs a brothel that catter to peculiar tastes so that probably involves a whole lot of violences (Fowler is one of her client, and Kaji seems to have seen a lot of men who "couldn't come until someone bled"), and Kaji has probably herself been on the receiving end of that (Mizu mentions Shindo hurting her, which could have actually happened ?), since she's no doubt also worked under a madame as a younger woman. She does have a mothering aspect to her, we see it fully with Kinuyo (she allows that Kinuyo won't work as a a prostitute because of her fear of men) but she's also clearly commanding (the women seem a bit scared if her in her first scene, she hits one of them, and know how she makes them "prove" themselves - one time resulting in an injury). I often thought of the way she responded to Akemi when she met her in Edo - it seemed very callous when Akemi feared that she would be hurt or killed by the guy she was meant to marry. But it probably comes from the experience of someone who is knowlegeable about sex & how to use it to get what she wants and stay in control of situations, and who has probably suffered abuse at the hands of many clients and sees it as a natural thing women must go through. So of course there's so envy towards Akemi that the other sex workers also express. But also just the feeling she's above it because she has survived much and survived that pain. It's an unfair and callous expectation but it speaks of her experience.

[alphaketoglutaricacid]

underrated how laios finds shuros inability to communicate in a manner comprehensible to other human beings kind of exhausting and annoying

[blujayonthewing]

opening the group chat for the first time today and there's like 200 new messages because everyone's Going Through It today it seems but one of my friends dropped 'I'm separating from [terrible boyfriend she's been living with for like eight years] for real this time, I just moved a bunch of stuff to my parents' and I'm losing my mind because y'all the subject changed almost immediately HEY HI EVERYBODY ELSE SHUT THE FUCK UP I WANNA HEAR ABOUT THAT???

[spock-smokes-weed]

Just finished blue eye samurai and if doesn’t get another season im gonna go full Mizu

Wtf was that ending.

[samuraikuraima]

Kuraima, what bands do you often listen to?

"I mostly listen to weezer and the smiths!"

[hauntingblue]

I have connected two dots... yamato kaido and momo (and kinda shirahoshi with her top) have clouds above their shoulders... and luffy in gear fourth has them also.... I can see the signs

[nerdacious]

Holy shit Blue Eyed Samurai is so fucking good.

[ghostlykidplaidbanana]

I really liked reading this bunny’s comics and I gotta figure out how to read more of em

[graysongraysoff]

can you do the trio for the chart. i want to know what ur hcs and stuff are 🤫

yes!!! yes i can!!!!

now i know this looks bad for mugen and it is but it's like

he is basard (affectionate)

i hate him, but with love

does that make sense?

anyway all of this is to say: pls jin just give me a chance i'm begging u,

edit: that illegible writing on jin's sheet says "not some guy nor protag but a secret third thing" lol

[yonezawacastle]

Nobuyuki's event stories really have become must-reads for me. Despite the restrictions being the heir places on his behavior, I feel like the writers are very consistently giving him things to do.