#ranewater calder

[littleeyesofpallas]

Bleach’s Issue with Queer characters (1/3)

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So, someone recently(when i started this draft anyway) left a kind of incoherent rant on one of my posts.  It wasn’t actually related to anything I’d said in the post, and just came across as disjointed babble, so it didn’t warrant a direct reply at the time.  But it did bring up a subject I would actually like to talk about:

How Kubo handles gender queer characters.

I think it’s a little easy to look at the most glaring cases, come to the conclusion that he doesn’t handle representation well, and leave it at that.  That’s valid.  And he’s clearly not well versed or tactful in how he portrays these characters, and it’s really not that unreasonable to judge him for it.  But I also think there’s more going on with it than that really accounts for, so let’s pick at it a little...

By and large what Kubo does is some pretty by-the-books queer-coding villains, and what amounts to casting effeminate men in adversarial roles.  In the big picture, it’s not a good trope to be falling back on: it comes from a bad place historically, and even if Kubo doesn’t mean anything bad by it (and I’ll get into why I think he genuinely doesn’t) it contributes to the momentum already behind it that other, less well intentioned creators and readers inevitably stand to do more direct harm with.

The earliest case of this is actually from Zombie Powder.  Very early episodic villain, Ranewater Calder is a youthful and even girlish looking man who is actually an old man sustained by a youth restoring drug.  He’s a villain of the week type, so the fact that he’s pretty and evil is literally all there is to him.  Moreover, his fixation on youth, his vanity, and his deception (he pretends to be a frail, dainty victim at first) all link directly to his moral character.  Although Calder is himself never made out to be gay, the archetype he's clearly based on is a pretty classically homophobic characterization at face value

But even here it’s not totally black and white...  

There’s a snag in that Kubo’s not writing some 1950s American pulp novel where the perils of homosexuality spell self-destruction or divine/dramatic irony on the loathesome villain; he’s writing a shounen action manga, and it operates on the Rule-of-Cool first and foremost.  Calder isn’t a vehicle for moral preaching by religious conservatives, he’s a highlight character taking up valuable print space in a popular comic.  He’s attractive, he has a cool name, he has a cool weapon with a unique fighting style, and even his vanity and deception aren’t there to make him unappealing, they’re there to make him compelling.

And herein lies the root of Kubo’s problem.  He just likes having cool characters, and he crams them in where ever he can fit them, and that often means in villain roles.  Moreover, although some characters get more vilified than others, even within the scope of villain roles, not all of them get to stick around long enough to be developed as either something other than queer and villainous, or to get the full turn around.  After all...

Yumichika was a villain at first.

And you’ll noticed I hesitated just now at calling it a “turn around” and not a “redemption” or “turning over a new leaf” because frankly, the Shinigami never actually changed alignment.  They were circumstantially the villains of the Soul Society Arc until Aizen turned on them to be the bigger "real” villain.  Technically it was Ichigo & co. that changed alignments from fighting against the Gotei13 to fighting with them.  But relatively aside, Yumichika became a good guy and his favorable portrayal got to outweigh his villainous introduction.

Speaking of which, there’s not a whole lot to go over with it, but Yumichika’s original appearance pretty closely mirrored the profile of Ranewater Calder’s bit in Zombie Powder: a kind of “sissy” prettyboy is obsessed with his looks, and other than just being a guy with a sword pointed at the established heroes making him a villain, that vanity and narcissism make them mean, judgy and vindictive.

But Yumichika came back, and stuck around, and frankly became something of a fan favorite.  And I think this particular development says a lot about how Kubo looks at these situations.  You’ll notice, he didn’t actually have to change Yumichika’s character much to shift him from villain to hero.  Yumichika gets a little less prickly, but he’s still vain and it’s not even something that anyone ever frames as a problem he needs to work on.  In fact, the introduction of his shikai brought into play a new facet of his vanity: Deception.  So we’re back to that Ranewater Calder framework, where the prettyboy has something to hide with his looks, but in Yumichika’s case it’s shown as an almost endearing quality.  He hides his sword’s powers, a reflection of his true self, to fit in.  But this isn’t shown to be a thing to pity, his willingness to sacrifice a part of his own identity is portrayed as a kind of noble restraint.

Now, granted, I don’t think those elements all play nicely together. (In fact, the nobility of his self-restraint is a very dangerous thing to uphold as a virtue) But when it comes to trying to draw a line between message and intent, I think the most pertinent thing to consider as context isn’t actually the villain or hero dichotomy, or even your own personal feelings about the themes in play, it’s the attitude ("attitude" as different from “intent,” mind you) of the creator towards his creations: Kubo seemed to enjoy making Yumichika.

He had fun with his design (the feathers and the weird sweater collar thing) He had fun with the sword, with giving him a secret power.  He had fun writing his vanity rants.  He didn’t have to have Yumichika, he didn’t have to bring him back, and he didn’t have to add to his character, but he did.  He invested his own time and effort and space on the page to him and to making him interesting to have around.

But like I said, Yumichika’s the lucky one.  He came in early, got to have a comeback, and had time to stick around.  But consider that when Kubo was floundering around trying to figure out how to salvage the mess that was the late TYBW arc, he didn’t need to bring back Arrancar, and he didn’t need to bring back the ones he did. (in fact, only the Privaron even make sense in-world, Luppi and Charlotte weren’t convenient choices, they were just Kubo’s personal picks.)  And when he did finally get around to cleaning up the Sternritter?  Bazz-B was an obvious choice to keep, sure (following that Renji/Grimmjow mold of the hotblodded rival who bucks his own organizations rules) but Giselle and Lilttoto?  That was Kubo playing favorites.

Luppi was so short lived, it’s hard to really say anything about him.  He was basically just reusing notes from Yumichika’s first appearance, which again also refer back to Ranewater Calder in Zombie Powder for basic aesthetic and demeanor.  (It’s actually kind of weird that Yumichika never really had any kind of dynamic with Luppi when they fought.)

Side note here, but Kubo really loves to build some of his recurring character types around a certain kind of scene or dynamic.  Byakuya and Ulquiorra both do this thing where they’re supposed to be the stoic unflinching types, but they actually get shocked and surprised almost constantly.  Kubo seems to be going into it with the mentality that he thinks it’s cool when the character who predicts everything and always has everything under control, can’t predict something and doesn’t have it under control, and just reverse engineers a stoic person for the purpose of having them “break character” later.  In this vein Kubo seems to have a real love of very pretty characters shifting into a kind of sinister “ugly mode.”  It wouldn’t serve his purpose to just have them ugly or obviously meanspirited all the time, the ugliness has to be served up in its reveal as that “breaking character” moment, even though that “breaking” moment is itself the core of the character.

Not to get too heady about this little observation, but it honestly feels like something that applies even to Kubo’s broader writing habits; wanting the payoff of a twist, and planning said twist first but then reverse engineering the supporting ruse only as a matter of course.  Just a silly little thought...

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[littleeyesofpallas]

BLEACH - Sternritter Schrift

The Viability (ザ·バイアビリチ → Za Baiabirichi)

生存能力 = 生存 → “Existance”/”Survival,” 能力 → “Ability”/”Faculty”/”Capacity”

This was the eventual explanation of Shaz Domino’s The V power, given to him by Gremmy as one of his creations.  But it’s ability basically granted him the power to survive without Gremmy’s direct influence, and it gave way to another new power, which I’ll get to at the end of this...

This wasn't technically the doing of Kubo, this was something Ryohgo Narita in the short story Beginning of the Revive of Tomorrow, in the 13 BLADEs bata book.  But he does tend to play ball with Kubo’s overall style and sensibilities pretty well. (although not always)

The Wind (ザ・ワインド → Za Wain’do)

紆余曲折 =  紆 → “Roundabout,” 余 → “Too Much,” 曲折 → “Winding”/“Twisting & Turning”

Specifically there the modifying/modified pair is 紆余 → “Too Roundabout” as 余 is a suffix.

This one was actually one of my favorite Sternritter powers.  Even though it’s a pretty straight forward idea without much obtuse interpretation of boundaries to contend with, I liked how it affected the physical world in a seemingly nonsense way but via a very clear abstract concept: Make things twisted.  So the spacial warping was a lot of fun.  Shame Nianzol died so quickly.

The X-Axis (ジ・イクサクシス → Zi Ikusakushisu)

万物貫通 =  万物 → “All things” 貫通 → “Pierce”/“Penetrate”    

It weirds me out everytime i try to read it that Kubo mashed the phonetics of “X” and “Axis” together, because I feel like it should make more sense to pronounce/write more like イクス アクシス → ikusu-akushisu; emphasizing the “EX-AX...” and not sounding like “Exacts...”

Funny enough Kubo actually made a typo in the original magazine print that had to be fixed for the book release.  He wrote it as 石物貫通, 石 → “Stone” rather than 万 → “10,000”/”Myriad”/”All,” and in both cases 物 → “Thing(s).”

I really wonder if Kubo had this one in mind early on or if he had to come to the realization halfway into the arc that he had extremely limited options for X.  It’s actually a really cool idea for a power considering what he had to work with.

The Yourself (ジ・ユアセルフ → Zi Yuaserufu)

貴方自身 = 貴方 → “You,” 自身 → “One’s Self” 

Honestly given what an abstract and grammar specific concept this is you’d think there’d have been a more complicated wordplay to it or something, but no, it’s super super straight forward somehow.

Worth nothing, if it hadn’t already been super obvious, the brothers Loyd Lloyd and Royd Lloyd have perfectly identical names in Japanese, both:  ロイド・ロイド → Roido Roido, and when their back story comes up it has to be specified Rの ロイド・ロイド → “Roido Roido of R” and  Lの ロイド・ロイド → “Roido Roido of L.”

The Zombie (ザ・ゾンビ → Za Zon’bi)

死者 = “The Deceased“/”A Casualty“

Weirdly there’s no real word play here.  And Japanese has a LOT of words for dead bodies: 骸, 遺骸, 遺体, 死体, 死骸, 死人, 屍, 躯, 惨死体, and others...

and there’s even the word 生ける屍, which specifically means “Living Corpse”

Also no apparently nods to Kubo’s original serial manga, Zombie Powder, which seems a missed opportunity given how often he’d salvaged bits and pieces of that work in Bleach. (Gremmy Thoumeux’s outfit is reminicent of Ranewater Calder’s original appearance, and Robert Accutrone is just one of several C.T.Smith clones Kubo has running around Bleach.)

The ς: The Sigma (シグマ → Shiguma)

��傷 =  聖 → “Holy”/”Divine”/”Saint” and 傷 → “Injury”/”Scar”/”Wound”

Another one by Narita for the same short story as the above.

Funny enough he botched this one up because the word he was looking for in English is “Stigma” which generally refers to a mark of shame or disgrace put upon a person by social conventions, but also more classically refers to Catholic belief in otherwise unexplained marks matching the placement of the wounds from the crucifixion left on the palms and feet of christ that appear on devout Christians as a kind of sign from god.  It’s taken from the Greek Stigmata(plural of stigma) στίγματα → “Marks”/”Spots”/”Brands.”

“Sigma” is just the Greek letter Σσ (ς final form) which has nothing to do with the word stigma.  The fact that Narita appeared to use ς instead of Σ (which would make more sense given the formatting of the rest of the Schrift) might have been a deliberate play on the term “Final form” used to denote that ς is only used when sigma is the final letter of a word.(and not upper case)

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