One day I will cry long enough to make you feel so sorry for me you will write that meta about heteronormativity of marines
aw, you don’t have to cry! asking nicely is all it takes.
so, when i say the marines are a rigid, heteronormative institution, what do i mean by that?
they work in the service of a heteronormative government and society—the world government, and the world nobles, who consider themselves superior to the rest of the world because of their bloodlines
they have heteronormative values—among them strictly defined gender roles and prioritizing relationships based in blood/deprioritizing all others
they use those values to dictate how the ‘civilized’ world should behave and assume that everyone shares those values, marking those who do not as uncivilized, criminal, and rebellious
more details below the cut.
any kind of royalty or nobility that defines itself as superior to the masses because of their bloodline, ancestors, etc. is going to be particular about having proof of that blood connection. if you think your blood makes you better, you better have documentation of it, family trees going back eight hundred years so no latecomers can doubt your importance.
they’re also going to care deeply about the “sanctity of marriage”—not because it’s actually sacred, but because if wives are cheating on their husbands then you can’t trust your family tree. and if your family tree is a lie, then maybe you aren’t actually superior to all of those dirty, common masses. the horror!
lastly, they have to care deeply about children. because, until someone develops some kind of immortality elixir, the only way to keep your very important family going (and it has to keep going, or what’s the point of any of this?) is to have children. and you’re going to prioritize biological children over any other, because if the child doesn’t have your blood, they aren’t really superior to the masses.
(the exception: note that the child sabo’s parents adopt when he runs away is chosen for his aptitude in school and his higher status biological family. bringing fresh blood into your family that improves your status is always beneficial, whether it’s through marriage or adoption.)
so. special bloodlines, preserved by marriages that produce biological children. until someone develops alternate methods of reproduction—which is not out of the question in one piece—all of that requires heterosexual relationships. they have to be the priority, in order for the superior bloodlines to persist.
thus, the prioritization and normalization of heterosexuality by the world nobles—and therefore the world government that serves them—and therefore the marines that serve them.
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what about those heteronormative values?
well, look at female marines. there aren’t many of them; even if you’re only thinking about named marines, women are outnumbered nearly ten to one. and the unnamed background guys are always guys, so actually it’s an even greater disparity. why? because a woman’s place is in the home. she should be a homemaker and mother, because continuing the family line is the point of a woman, according to the nobility’s heteronormative view of the world. going against that is to set yourself up for a struggle. and a number of these ladies do struggle.
bell-mère had to leave the marines to keep her kids, taking on a job with a highly variable income that left her nearly starving at times; men in the marines have no such trouble, though whether that’s because of narratively invisible wives or these men not caring if they raise their children well is unclear.
tashigi has an enormous complex over being treated differently because she’s a woman, and it’s not a complex that comes out of nowhere—she is treated differently. most of her opponents beat her easily and then let her live for no good reason; as a captain she’s idolized, not respected, by her crew.
then there’s characters like hina and tsuru, whose presence high up in the military structure is acceptable because they have powers that put their opponents into submissive, humiliating positions. you don’t see a female marine with one of those elemental devil fruits; no, they have to have a fruit with a power play component to it. because god forbid women hold positions of power if they don’t have a bit of a dominatrix energy to them. (actually it’s because they’re being subversive in service to the state and the status quo, which makes them acceptably quirky rather than rebellious, not unlike members of SWORD, or our single female warlord.)
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and then there’s the prioritization of bloodlines.
we see that value most clearly in the paramount war, where ace is executed not because he’s the second division commander of the whitebeard pirates, not because of any crimes he’s committed, but because of who his father is. a man who died long before ace was born, a man ace hates because of the awful opinion the civilized world has of him (and therefore his kin), a man who had no influence on ace in any way but blood. that’s enough reason to kill a man, by the marines’ logic.
and the man ace does call father, who embraced ace and gave him a loving family? well, that man, as far as the marines are concerned, only took ace in to put him on the throne of the pirate king, making himself the power behind the throne. (because naturally a king’s son should inherit his throne! never mind that whitebeard’s power far outstrips ace’s—surely pirates would only bow down before their king’s rightful, blood heir—and the marines can’t allow for the pirates to unify under one man’s leadership like that.) to the marines, ace only has value as roger’s heir, and so they expect that to be all the value he has to anyone.
and this backfires on them. the betrayal from within the whitebeard fleet (which the marines orchestrated) operates on the assumption that whitebeard will prioritize ace over the rest of his fleet. but all of the whitebeard pirates are his children, and he makes that clear when he gives them an out, allowing them to abandon him to his death if they so choose. the marines wanted to show the world that even this benevolent father figure of a pirate captain was a monster deep down, but they couldn’t pull it off. they don’t believe whitebeard is sincere in his affections for his ‘sons,’ and that costs them the narrative they wanted for the paramount war.
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there’s also this one-off line that i rediscovered while rereading impel down/marineford to prep for this post, which in retrospect explains garp’s manic insistence on his grandson becoming a marine.
in chapter 530, hearing that luffy’s broken into impel down, sengoku shouts, “if you weren’t called ‘the navy’s hero,’ i’d make you pay for the sins of your entire family, garp!” as a counterpart to it being just and lawful to kill people for the crime of being related to a sufficiently dangerous criminal, garp and others like him believe that if you serve the state well enough, you can be forgiven for the crime of being related to a criminal.
if luffy (and ace) had just become a marine, garp thinks, then the identity of luffy’s father wouldn’t matter.
which strikes me as very naive. of course it would still matter; blood is the only thing that matters to these people.
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and @maljefe wrote in the journal : “ it was a pleasure to know you. ” she breathed out, gazing into his terrified face. show scripts of the tales of loni and kazimir.
❛ loni... ❜ he gasps out, existential crisis momentarily forgotten as the shock brings out the most in human capacity. he stares at her with dread, electric blue eyes widened as blood splatters onto his face, covers him like paint would a canvas. and what a morbid artwork the scene makes; shewolf barely holding on above him, hovering as her breaths get weaker before she crashes down on top of the cyborg, landing harshly against metallic frame. his eyes are still fixated at the spot where she would have been just a moment ago while her blood begins to roll down his face, eyes still as shocked as he can be while he stares into nothing. he says her name again, distantly as if he doesn't quiet grasp the situation. and maybe he doesn't; if he did then in this very moment the entire city would be burning to the ground. well ... most of it; he'd have to keep it safe enough to get chris out of this hellhole.
the thought of chris snaps him back to reality, makes him raise his arms weakly as if to make loni move to get off of him. ❛ hey... you have to get up. ❜ he speaks plainly before he raises his arms again, lightly grasping her arms to give her soft shakes this time. ❛ come on... chris will be angry if we're late. ❜ he speaks, voice growing more desperate. why does this feel familiar, this sensation of dread and panic? ah ... that's right. he's felt it before as a scared teenager after his first murder, when he just wanted to protect a friend and then had to flee the country to keep his family out of the crossfire. when he had to abandon everything he knew at age 14 and had to find a way to survive in a foreign country. except, despite that childish terror and the dread and fear he's felt for months back then ... this here, this was worse. it sent him back to when his sister locked him in a dark room when he was seven, thinking of it as a game and only letting him out once his terrified cries reached her ears. except this time there was nobody to let him out of the darkness; the person who could have is laying motionless on top of his cold body. he shakes her again, stronger this time.
❛ hey...!! loni!! you have to get up...!! this is no place for sleeping...!! ❜ he says, louder, more frantic before he shoots to sit up, clinging to her as if she were a life vest. he can hear a pulse, faint and slow and nearing its limit but it's there. of course it is, it wouldn't be loni valadian otherwise. he thinks. if he's knows he knows a lot about her and at the same time nothing at all. fear crushes him like rubble and suddenly he's on his feet, holding her with a gentleness that seems so alien coming from him. and he's running, desperately so. with the fastest speed he can manage. foolish ideas of revenge abandoned behind him when he makes it out of the building while holding onto his past, present and future. he has to find the doctor that saved him. he has-- if anyone can come even close to saving loni (within a reasonable distance) it's that stupid doctor. he runs, ignoring anything around him, the route familiar against his will while he looks down at the one person he managed to consistently let down.
❛ don't die on me ... i promise i'll tell you everything you want ... i'll let you in ... just ... come back to me, please ... i can't lose you ... not again ... ❜
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