Bleach vs Women (aka, all of Bleach up to chapter 395)

[snarp]

I'm all caught up in Bleach! Also, I kind of hate myself.

At the beginning of the Arrancar arc I started keeping score on the female fight scenes. This is how my scoring works:

+1 for female hero winning
-1 for female hero losing
+1/2 for female villain winning
-1/2 for female villain losing

So, a neutral score would be zero; Claymore's score would be fairly close to zero, because the Claymores mostly fight women; and Battle Angel Alita's score would be, like, 7.63 * 10^9, because Alita almost always fights men.

Note that it doesn't matter who the woman fights here. If Yoruichi were to defeat a moderately-sized talking sea snail entirely offscreen, while onscreen we had, like, Hanatarou, Kon, and Don Kanonji fighting big terrifying things with lots of trash-talking? Yoruichi would still get a full point for her dead sea snail.

What I'm trying to say is, I feel I was being fairly generous.

Obviously, lots of spoilers under the cut.

-

Further technicalities:

- Mutual destruction is a zero.

- I didn't count group fights of the sort where a whole bunch of characters on one side attack at once while one of them talks about friendship and/or victory.

- I did count group fights of the sort where two or three characters team up and have discussions about their opponents' weapons and talk trash and such.

- Any fight in which a woman teams up with one or more guys from the beginning counts as a zero, whether it ends in a win or a loss.

- However, any fight in a which a guy rescues a woman gets a minus.

- I'm leaving out the two "bullying" scenes wherein the two jealous Arrancar women torment Orihime and are driven off by Arrancar men, because I found them too irritating to read closely and I don't remember the outcomes.

- I'm pretty sure I'm missing something with Yoruichi early on, but I'm not going back to check because Urahara was with her and thus it doesn't count.

-

Battles involving female characters, from the beginning of the Arrancar arc on:

0: Orihime - With Chad, defeated by Yammy.
+1: Rukia - Defeats non-recurring disposable guy dramatically in one hit.
-1: Rukia - And then immediately needs Ichigo to rescue her from Grimmjow.
+1: Matsumoto - Defeats non-recurring disposable guys off-screen. (All the male shinigami had on-screen battles.)
-1/2: Cirucci - Loses to Ishida.
0: Rukia - Mutual destruction with non-recurring disposable guy. Rescued by Byakuya.
-1: Nell - Defeated by Nnoitra. She powers up twice trying to do it, is built up as being totally awesome, and then powers down spontaneously, is beaten, and vanishes forever. The flashbacks blame her for Nnoitra's emotional problems, because she used to be stronger than he was and that made him sad. Kenpachi defeats Nnoitra.
+1: Soi Fong - Defeats non-recurring disposable person of indeterminate gender. (The scans used male pronouns for her opponent, so I won't take any off.)
-2: Matsumoto and Hinamori - Seem to be doing okay against Harribel's three female subordinates, but are defeated immediately when said subordinates summon a male monster they can't control. Rescued by Kira and Hisagi; Yamamoto defeats the monster by waving his hand around some.
-1 1/2: Harribel's Subordinates - Yamamoto defeats them with more gestures.
-1/2: Harribel - Defeated by Hitsugaya.
-1/2: Lilynette - Defeated by Ukitake with hand gestures, then turns out not actually to exist independent of Stark.
-1: Soi Fong - Losing to Baraggan, is rescued by Hacchi. Also: She has her vice-captain helping her from the beginning, loses an arm, and spends most of fight looking terrified. The other captains, also fighting Espada, do not need help, are not mutilated, and never look afraid. Soi Fong even looks scared when she first summons her Bankai, something none of the male characters has ever done.
-1/2: Harribel - Murdered by Aizen. She gets four words of dialog. For comparison, Stark, introduced much more recently, had a half-chapter long death scene full of dialog-heavy flashback.
-1: Mashiro - Losing to Wonderweiss, is rescued by the blond Vaizard guy whose name I forget.
-1: Hiyori - Defeated by Aizen.

We get a score of -7.5. If we eliminate the two Aizen incidents, given that Ichigo's got to be the one to beat him, it's -6.

If I were a good scientist, I'd have been doing a similar survey of the male characters, but just as an estimate, I'd guess a score up in at least the positive teens.

On the racism and ableism fronts:

Chad Status:

(Yeah, I know he's not ethnically Latino, but he's obviously meant to be read that way, given that he considers himself culturally Mexican and his magic powers all have Spanish names.)

As in the Soul Society arc, Chad gets creamed. This time he never wins any fights at all, and gets creamed three times instead of one: he's torn to shreds twice and rescued by Ichigo once. He's the only male hero this happens to.

Tousen Status:

Tousen, apparently not othered enough already, transforms into a huge black fly with a human mouth, and screams, "I can see, I CAN SEEEEEE!" Because it was totally inappropriate that Tousen's blindness wasn't a big point of angst for him earlier on?

I don't even know what to say about the damn fly thing.

Comments

never has this icon seemed more appropriate

[starlady]

OMf'ingG.

Okay, fine, I did remember my equivalent awesome crappy paper, which was surveying female characters' pronoun usage in this manga up through, mm, volume 24? and examining it for women's language, essentially. The survey was fine, I guess, I don't remember my conclusion, but it probably had something to do with the manga purportedly being "nouveau shonen". And there is all that hype about Bleach being "nouveau shonen" or whatever (aka oh crap we have market shrink we have to get girls to read shonen!), and particularly in the beginning, the inclusion of characters like Chad and the prominence of the female characters seemed so novel and promising, and now…it's just the same old fracking thing. Fuck you, KT.

Re: never has this icon seemed more appropriate

[snarp]

How girly is most of women's language? (I've never read any of Bleach in Japanese.) I'm assuming that Rukia throws a lot more "wa" around when she's play-acting in the early volumes than she does in her normal speech, and that Yoruichi says "boku" or "ore."

(And given that you did actual primary source research, and didn't just stretch out inane statements to paragraph-length and call it a day, your paper cannot possibly compete with mine.)

I wish I hadn't found out about Kubo Tite's Twitter, because I'm now fighting this hideous temptation to go over there and interrogate him about these issues.

Re: never has this icon seemed more appropriate

[starlady]

OMG he has a Twitter!? …I'm torn between saying "DO IT" and saying "No, don't!"

Um...fairly girly, actually. If you're interested in the more technical answer, this is the second half of my presentation text:

"To collect my data, I read approximately two-thirds of the entire manga, which currently numbers 255 chapters. Each time a female character used a first-person pronoun, I noted that character’s identity and the pronoun she used. I did not count the number of times a certain character used a given pronoun because some female characters appear for only a few panels in one chapter, while others appear nearly every week. Tallying every occurrence would have skewed my results.

I found a total of twenty-three female speakers in Bleach who used a wide variety of first-person pronouns. The two most common pronouns were watashi and atashi; atashi was actually the pronoun of choice for more than half (twelve) of the female characters. Eight speakers habitually used watashi, and one speaker each used uchi, washi, and ore.

Most characters, to my surprise, used only one set first-person pronoun. Only two displayed a variation in their pronoun usage based on the formality of their situation, which is considered an important aspect of politeness and propriety in spoken Japanese. In both cases these speakers habitually used atashi and “upgraded” to watashi when circumstances, such as directly disobeying a superior officer or reciting a ritual phrase, required.

Leaving these two instances of situational variation aside, I found that the choice of first-person pronoun was strongly indexed to age or to apparent maturity. Younger speakers overwhelmingly used atashi, while a majority of older speakers used watashi, including one apparently college-age speaker who was probably trying to mark herself as “mature” by using watashi. Watashi was also strongly indicative of authority: of the eight female characters of all ages placed in positions of responsibility, five used watashi.

What watashi did not index, however, was combat ability, which is not something traditionally associated with the ideology of femininity and of proper feminine behavior that accompanies ideas of “women’s language.” Because watashi is more gender-neutral than atashi (men will use it in formal contexts), I would have expected characters such as the runner-up national girls’ karate champion to use watashi. However, this was not the case. Of the seventeen female speakers with some sort of combat ability, ten used atashi, four watashi, and three some other pronoun.

The three speakers who did not use atashi or watashi bear some further explanation. None of the three are “human” speakers in the strictest sense of the word; in Bleach one is either a member of the human world or of some alternate spiritual dimension, although almost all characters in the manga appear completely human. The speaker who used uchi spoke Kansai-ben exclusively; thus her use of uchi, which was originally a dialect form and is now gaining more currency throughout Japan, is unremarkable. The character who used washi spends more than half the manga in the form of a cat; thus when she reveals herself as a woman the audience is stunned, since washi has “old-man” connotations. The character who used ore is perhaps best described as a law unto herself—she smokes a pipe, is missing an arm due to her work as an firework-maker, and intimidates almost everyone, including her tough-guy younger brother and the punkish main character of the manga.

In conclusion, it seems clear that Bleach is at least nudging gently at the boundaries of the ideology of women’s language, not so much through actual language practice (since only three of twenty-three speakers do not use the ideologically permissible pronouns watashi and atashi) as through how speakers of ideologically acceptable pronouns are portrayed: they fight, hold positions of authority, and do not hesitate to punch the manga’s main character. None of these activities were formerly considered “feminine,” and to a large extent they are still not.

Further study would reveal whether these language/ideology developments are an idiosyncracy of Kubo Taito or whether popular culture in general is expanding the concepts of “proper” female behavior via language markers. A synchronic study of one issue of Shonen Jump, which features twenty-two manga series a week, would be one possible method. Another would be to examine a similarly popular shoujo (girls’) manga magazine using the same methodology. " (12/12/06)

Re: never has this icon seemed more appropriate

[snarp]

I should probably be grateful that I hadn't realized Hiyori spoke with a Kansai-ben - the way some of the scanlators portray that with Gin makes me very sad. (I think your file got corrupted there.)

Re: never has this icon seemed more appropriate

[starlady]

Augh, what the crap, powerpoint, you suck. It looked fine before I exported it, I swear. Sorry.

Yes, she speaks Kansai-ben! It's one of the things I love about her. And fairly thick Kansai-ben at that, at least for non-native speaker me--though I always wonder how much dialects are being written according to the idea of how the dialect sounds rather than how speakers actually speak it.

Re: never has this icon seemed more appropriate

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Is it worse than what the Gunlock dub did with Hazel?

Re: never has this icon seemed more appropriate

[snarp]

I HAVE CAREFULLY AVOIDED FINDING THAT OUT, THANK YOU. Tempt me not to YouTube!

(Though I have trouble imagining how you could make Gunlock any worse.)

Re: never has this icon seemed more appropriate

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Hazel's inexplicable accent truly has to be heard to be believed. Even the worst faux-Southern or faux-Noo Joisey interpretations of Kansai-ben are things of beauty, cultural sensitivity and understated good taste compared to the sheer WTF??1?-ery every time he opens his mouth.