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snarpI'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.
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.
no subject
Date: 2010-03-20 04:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-20 07:45 pm (UTC)