#i get taigen and mizu

[scarlet-rosefinch]

akemi and mizu truthers i need all of u pls BDHSABDHSADAS HOW MANY ARE WE

[sockich]

I WANT TO BE GREAT.

BLUE EYE SAMURAI (2023)

[bucky-thebae-barnes]

the inherent homoeroticism of "no one gets to kill you but me"

[luminarai]

Ringo says work smarter, not harder (also he replaced the pieces with delicious homemade cookies before the game even started. Taigen never notices)

stickers etc here

[mountainmagpie]

Every friend group should include:

[haydardotjpg]

Blood sticks, sweat drips Break the lock if it don't fit A kick in the teeth is good for some A kiss with a fist is better than none

———

wait what do you mean a red string of fate ties us together but all we do is strangle each other with it. what do you mean this string can only stretch and tangle but never break and yet we keep biting and gnawing on it to try to free ourselves from it anyway.

[unluckiestmember]

can I request mizu with just a very tender and sweet and caring fem reader. Like just giving mizu all of the comfort she never got all these years. Like all the comfort and warmth she lacked suddenly coming all at once and like reader is super patient and just so genuinely kind to mizu

Coming right up!

Mizu (Blue Eye Samurai) X Caring Fem! Reader

Characters: Mizu, Taigen and Ringo.

Tags: Mizu being Mizu, Soft!Mizu, Tender Loving Care, TLC, excessive fluff, Taigen being jealous, Ringo being Ringo, hugging. Just a bunch of cuteness ahead. XD

Warning: SFW. Suggestive Theme.

A/N: Mizu really does need all the love in the world after what she's been through. We love you, Blue Eye Samurai.

With how sweet and caring you naturally were to everyone, Mizu thought one of the following;

You were wearing a facade as a tactic or you were another weak soul in a sea of ignorant and idiotic people.

She didn’t give you the time of day at first, keeping herself away from you, Taigen and Ringo.

But that didn’t stop you from taking care of this woman with all your heart.

When you cared for her wounds from battle, she eased up a bit, thankful for your assistance.

When you held her hand for support, she froze up a bit to the almost foreign concept, but gently held your hand back. She liked that.

When you hugged her, Mizu’s frozen heart found itself thawing.

And when you kissed her, the ice around her heart melted as she kissed you back.

Eventually, she craved your touch. She always needed something from you against her.

Some days she seeped into your arms, picking up your scent and smiling when you kissed her cheek.

Some nights she held you for dear life, cuddling against your body with promises of protecting you from this cruel world.

Taigen couldn’t tell if he should thank you for thawing Mizu’s heart or curse you for being so unnecessarily sweet around him.

Ringo on the other hand thought you guys were the cutest couple he’s ever come across.

Regardless, every sweet action you gave this blue eyed samurai made her become more humane and in tune with her emotions.

Now when you feed her occasionally, she feeds you back.

If you’re checking for injuries and tending to her, Mizu will do the same with ten times more love and care.

If you hug her now, she will hold you and immediately miss your touch when you let go.

Maybe she was happy a long time ago, but nowadays Mizu felt blessed.

You are the source of her happiness and the best thing that’s ever happened to her.

If you got any requests for Blue Eye Samurai, send them my way!

Likes and retweets are always appreciated! I love you all, stay hydrated and have a good day! <3

[hauntingofhouses]

shoutout to taigen for being the most expressive character in the entire show.

you will never not know whatever the hell he is feeling or thinking at the moment because he will literally tell you (either very earnestly like when he traumadumps to mizu or very sarcastically which is the other 99% of the time he talks to mizu) or you will see it plain as day on his face.

this is the textbook definition of a man wearing his heart on his sleeve. look in the dictionary for what a "simple man" means and you will find taigen's face there.

like once you cut through the massive ego and pompousness he uses to mask his own insecurities and traumas, he is literally just some guy. he's not evil or stupid. not super kind or super smart either. an asshole but not the worst there is. he's incredibly skilled but he's not the strongest ever or even the most skilled. he is literally! just a guy!

y'all can hate him all you want but let's be real, taigen is actually the most relatable character out of everyone. like this man is POOR, he is PATHETIC, he is COMPLAINING ALL THE TIME, and most of all he is OBSESSED WITH MIZU. if that shit ain't relatable idk what is.

[libbyrequiresescapism]

*flips table* mizu

[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."

[prickly-paprikash]

Whoever you ship Mizu with, it is ultimately gay as fuck.

Mizu and Akemi? That's just two angry wlw's haunted by the image of one another who have been pushed into different but mirroring paths that will one day intertwine, and their anger and regret will balloon into a terrifying clash. Violent? Yes. Passionate? Extremely. Sexual Tension? Nuclear-level.

Mizu and Taigen? Mizu didn't really mind the other acts of sex in Madame Kaji's brothel until she got to the dudes fuckin, and her immediate thought was how close Taigen and his lips were during their tumble in their duel. It's very clear Mizu sees her relationship with Taigen as homoerotic, and has shown some interest in it. That's just trans masc x bottom bi, baby.

Mizu, Taigen and Akemi?

So. Fucking. G A Y.

There ain't no cis-het reading of Blue Eye Samurai, bucko. This shit's the purest crystal queer in the market. It ain't cloudy. It ain't distilled.

This show is raw, uncut Mizumphetamine. Mizu is the chemicals injected into the water that's making the freaking fags frogs gay.

Mizu's the baddest bitch around. Be in awe of this undying fuck's energy. She is 2023's top bitch magnet. She doesn't get bitches. She pins them down, strikes the fear of her in them, and wields a fucking sword made to slaughter the heavens.

[afflatusssss]

my first contribution to the blue eye samurai fandom (i just think they all ought to kiss….and that “tazuki” sounds like a nice shipname…)

[loptrcoptr]

Help

[ghibliwatcher]

The way I got into blue eye samurai was bc of HER

Like who created her to be this fine??? Mizu pls be real I really can’t do this anymore

[luminarai]

I’ve seen a lot of people wonder if Taigen’s gonna pull a Li Shang from Mulan once he finds out about Mizu’s Secret™️ but I mean. This man’s internal logic is already so damn weird, this might as well happen, y’know??

Bonus:

[solar-eclippse]

Y'know, I don't really do bully/victim ships. Taizu is the only one I've really been on board with.

I interpreted a lot of Taigen's aggression as a child (and in the present) as a victim with a fight response trying to make himself look tough and scary so people wouldn't try to mess with him, and Mizu was an easy victim to demonstrate just that.

But as an adult, Mizu is not such an easy victim. Now, they strike first. For the person who tormented you to follow you to the ends of the earth, praise you for your skills, to witness all your power and realize how attracted he is to it... now that's a power fantasy.