#but also it’s like soooo many men who grow up in this type of household environment expect their wives to also be their mothers when they

[inkykeiji]

my boyfriend’s mom will be out all night on a date so i get to play housewife tonight n make the boys dinner :)

[raconteur-wanpi]

nice to see meta/effortposting on reiju <3 she did hit me hard as someone who came from an abusive and toxic home life. the sibling dynamics of: here's the family scapegoat who acts as a lightning rod for all negative attention, here's the quiet one who skirts under the radar by toeing the line because- as much as they empathize with the scapegoat despite not being supposed to- if they don't grit their teeth and bear it, they're the one who will end up in that role if they rock the boat, and here are the ones who don't seem to be suffering at all and excell at embodying Our Family's Values- is something i lived growing up. i was mostly the problem kid scapegoat but the roles shifted around musical chairs style

it struck me a lot during whole cake that she really didnt have options, like, as awful as they were to sanji you cant really convince me reiju would have fared any better in his place bc A. that type of family situation WILL ALWAYS have a scapegoat to practice in-group bonding through malicious othering (god forbid there be any bonding rituals with a healthy basis) B. even if she was a partial success on the genetic engineering front she was already playing with a handicap from the get being The Girl One in *that* family. like can you imagine the misogyny flavored abuse and ridicule if she ever wasnt the exact right balance of competent and withdrawn, yknow. and as eyeroll as i think it is in theory to write the girl sibling as the one with the emotions bc of course women are the sensitive empathetic feelings creatures (sarcasm), it speaks to a real dynamic that can occur within the family unit where young girls are implicitly expected & groomed (from within the family and without, bc it's cultural messaging too) to be mature-beyond-their-years emotional mediators, conflict diplomats, & general Vibe micromanagers for the whole household. just one domestic facet of the larger systemic phenomenon of adultification of young girls really

as happens with one piece, the vinsmoke family picture really manages to capture some resonant shit through blunt, broad, story-for-adolescent boys strokes.. like, the survivor's guilt about being the one who got out when you know someone is still there suffering in silence. the weird tense resentful but forgiving bond with the person you survived it all with. the mutual wonder at the rest of you who turned out exactly like your awful guardian and don't outwardly seem to be eaten away at by your collective childhood... is all their hurt (like we have) so deeply repressed for them that it would take an earthshattering shift in worldview that has a one in a million chance of happening to uncover? is it that they were just born wired completely different from us? is it obstinate willful ignorance operating on some protective unconscious level? is it that they were genetically engineered to be impervious emotionless color coded tokusatsu mercenary supersoldiers. etc.

Anyway sorry for rambling at you lol.

Don't apologize this is soooo good! Never apologize for meaningful discussion within Fandom space, that's what I and many others come here for. I agree entirely!

Especially on the point about how Oda handled the trope of "the one woman being the one with emotions", because I do think that, on the one hand it's definitely part of Oda's sexism, and particularly his difficulty with writing villainous women in his story, but on the other hand it does end up, even accidentally, as you said, feeling like a narrative on the emotional labor expected from women and specifically the misogyny of the Vinsmoke family, which is dominated by the violence of men. It is super intriguing to me how her narrative kinda both exhibits sexist tropes while also having an underlying feminist tone to it as well.

One Piece unfortunately does this a lot, and I do think it is the result of Oda being ideologically feminist while also being practically sexist. It's a very common attitude unfortunately, and if OP wasn't as well written as it is, I would have less patience for it, but hopefully I find myself able to look at the silver lining of it all. Oda does this a lot with his queer characters as well; OP is an unapologetically, openly and obviously pro-queer narrative in every sense, and you're meant to love its queer characters as the audience, but that doesn't stop many of them from being very out-of-touch and sometimes even mean-spirited stereotypes at the same time. Either way, I try to look at the positives, and at the end of it all, these are indeed extremely interesting, humanized, and well written characters.

On the narrative of abuse, I'm not someone who can speak on it since I'm lucky enough to not have experienced it, but both from your message and from what I've seen other people say, I can definitely see how even in its exaggerated cartooniness, many people have found the depiction of it within the Vinsmokes (and the Charlottes) very familiar or relatable.

I think her situation hits even harder when you remember that the whole "she was also supposed to be born emotionless" thing was a mistranslation; she's not a "partial" sucess, all the modifications she had were successful! There was never an attempt to remove her compassion etcetera, since it's implied her father tried that for the first time ever on the quadruplets. In other words, it's implied her family fully knows she has emotions, since she never had that operation done to her, the cold-heartedness and all that other stuff is not technically expected of her. But it is still demanded. That's the horrible part, isn't it? She's expected to artificially emulate her brothers, when that's not something that was even initially asked or expected from her.

Reiju is a character that's extremely relatable to me in a lot of other ways. The high expectations put upon her, her practiced emotional constipation, her... complicated relationshp with her stubborn reactionary stemlord ex-military father (what is projection), her trying to fit the role of the "responsible perfect model child" etc etc. The whole situation feels viscerally realistic despite being in a silly shonen manga. I desperately hope we get to see her again.