Bleach and power fantasies.

[snarp]

I was writing a response to a comment of chomiji's and it got out of hand, so it's getting its own post.

At the core, 95% of shounen manga are fantasies of power. Most of them specifically work with the idea of an "inner strength" that's greater than outer strength - because, you know, most people reading manga are not big huge muscle-dudes. So the idea that this person of apparently ordinary physical size and strength could become the hero that everyone looks up to and fears, because of some internal quality, is very appealing.

Manga depending on this idea - and this occurs in shoujo as well as shounen - usually have some visible symbol of "inner strength." Bankai and transformations are Bleach's. Displaying and using your inner strength is simultaneously an act of aggression and a form of communication - if two shounen manga characters beat each other down with all their inner strength, they nearly always at least respect each other at the end. Sometimes they become BFFs! (See: like, half of Ichigo's current relationships with guys. He has beat most of these people up!)

In the most compelling shounen manga battles, when you agree to "show someone your true power," what you're doing is offering them a kind of intimacy, because you're showing them your soul.* And like in real life, making that offer requires a certain surety of oneself. This is why, when a Bleach character has summoned his Bankai for the first time in the past, he's always looked cocky or solemn or angry. He may also look tired or like he's under strain (Ikkaku did, and I think Hitsugaya?), but he never looks scared, because it goes against genre logic for a person who's not sure of himself to voluntarily put his soul out in front of someone else. It would be self-destructive - hence the trope where someone who's panicking or deluding themselves about something tries to use their secret technique, and either can't summon it, or loses control and kills themself with it.

Now, in later uses of the "true power," it's okay to portray it merely as a weapon, because the reader's already familiar with the character's soul, even if the opponent isn't. If every opponent reacts the same way to the revelation of the hero's power, the readers will start rolling their eyes. This is part of why characters like Ichigo just keep powering up throughout a shounen series. It's not purely escalation of the danger level; it's also a reassurance to the readers that the characters still have depths yet to be explored, and that they're growing and changing.**

(Some of the most successful manga of this kind are, I think, the coming-of-age stories, where these transformations mark a character's movement towards self-knowledge and responsibility. In my experience, shoujo manga does this better than shounen - Sugar Sugar Rune and Divine Melody are my favorite examples. Though Divine Melody still has time to kill everybody and break my heart.)

So, what all this was leading up to was: Soi Fong's first use of her Bankai, which is also the first time a female character has used Bankai in combat.

What strikes me as the special failure in this fight is that, the very first time we see her use her Bankai, she is visibly scared and having trouble handling it. She has lost her self-confidence and her opponent is not at all impressed by her Bankai - and indeed, it proves incapable of damaging him.

I want to stress again that this has never happened to any of the male characters. Including the little boy and the guy with consumption. It's happening this time because the most important characteristic of the shounen manga hero is "inner strength," and the manga wants to make it clear that Soi Fong - aside from the non-combatant Unohana, the only female captain - does not have it.

And this goes back to the Girl Power Corrupts rant. In Bleach, "good" power is masculine, and power tied to women is always fragile or unstable or poisonous, even if the narrative likes the woman in question. I don't think Kubo Tite actually likes Soi Fong much, but I do think he likes Rukia, Orihime, and Nell, and he treats them very similarly.

The issue is that, as Jason Thompson/khyungbird points out in this essay, the use of power in shounen manga is often justified and centered emotionally by the ideal of "protecting" someone or something. Because the conceit of the Fake Karakura Town arc has made the idea of protecting the town kind of blurry and hard to relate to, the violence that's taking place often seems to have no purpose. So to make us care about what's going on, Kubo Tite needs to come up with someone or something more concrete to protect. He's clearly chosen to do this by weakening the female characters.

This is okay with him because, by protecting someone, you are asserting superiority over them by proving that you're stronger than they are, and that they need you. (Some stories will have a male hero protect a female villain (or a male villain protect a female hero) from some threat to prove the guy's superiority without having to show a man hitting a woman.) As I think he made very clear in Nnoitra's flashbacks about Nell, Kubo Tite is aware of the existence of a power dynamic here, and thinks it's unacceptable for a woman to exert that sort of power over a man.

It was okay for him to have Rukia and Matsumoto protecting Karakura Town itself, because of the level of abstraction involved in protecting a place rather than a person. Now that the plot's getting more personal, however, he's not letting the women win any fights, because 1) he doesn't have many of them, and they're all needed for Protected Item duty, and 2) that might eventually put them in a unfortunate position of either protecting a man, or at least proving themselves capable of doing so.

To which I gesture with a specific finger. But this is why Soi Fong's scene bugged me so much - because in Bleach, a person's worth is determined by a specific thing, and this scene was a sort of the closing argument following ten volumes of insistence that women don't have it.

(And I may have similar things to say about the treatment of Tousen once I stop being too ticked off to talk about him.)

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* This is one of the things that makes Kurama in YuYu Hakusho's fight scenes so gloriously evil - when Kurama fights someone all-out, the imagery is that of a particular kind of intimacy. Oh, Togashi Yoshihiro, I do love you so. (One could, I think, say similar things about the fight scenes in Saiyuki!)

** And even beyond all the other problems, I think the failure here is why it's so hard to care about Bleach right now. Because Ichigo's no longer changing as a person, the constant power-ups are gratuitous and randomly-placed. (See also: Anita Blake.)

Also, Aizen never transforms and has a Bankai that literally can't be seen. By Bleach's own rules, this makes him the least interesting character in the story. You could do some compelling, possibly even subversive things with this, if he had a personality and character development - but he doesn't. I remember someone saying that Hinamori's Stockholm's Syndrome was the only interesting thing about him, and that's really true.

ETA: Edited to fix some typos and a poorly-worded sentence very late at night.

Comments

[torachan]

Wow, so true.