#because my compulsion is fickle in its methods

[littleeyesofpallas]

Not to be a weirdo and go all anime tiddy detective(again...) but I've been seeing my awkwardly salvaged Gigi/Senjumaru post getting notes, and among other issues i have with how that post wound up I do feel like I didn't actually articulate my characterization of Senjumaru's design very clearly.

Kubo's got certain sensibilities about his character design. Usually i get fixated on his love of dramatic "crazy face" and the fandom at large fixates on that one big breasted body type he knows the fans love, but he also has a pretty robust cast of modestly proportioned girls. That being said, he walks a line on that, and is very deliberate in making sure to always remind everyone that his small breasted characters do still have a noticeable chest. It's a little weird but it's pretty specific because you'd think it would be easy enough to let their silhouette flatten out for the sake of simplicity, or speed, or just because sometimes a camera angle won't naturally emphasize the bust, yet time and again he stays consistent on it in a way that predicates intent.

Also worth noting in the context of things here, Isane sort of implicitly binds on account of otherwise conflicting omake details vs her strict canon appearances. Unohana implicitly binds due to her traditional style of dress that fundamentally includes flattening out the chest silhouette. AND YET in the face of those facts they're still drawn to show distinct curvature to the chest line. Rukia, Hinamori, and Shino are all generally infantilized as a part of their design aesthetic, Rukia passing as a 15yo, Hinamori being demure and doll-like(ala her name), and Shino being part of an expressly younger generation than the heroes when she's introduced. They're still drawn with noticeable breasts: moreover there is every opportunity to just entirely lose their silhouettes to the featureless blackness of the shinigami uniform, and Kubo goes back in with the white ink anyway. SuiFeng and Hiyori actually both nearly dodge this by wearing clothes that do actually obscure their body shape, but then Kubo seemingly compensates for that modesty by giving Sui Feng her sideboob outfit when she throws off her haori(and its apparent attached sleeves?), and giving Hiyori almost out of place cleavage(well, that and almost constant midriff shots)

Point again being that these are characters with distinctly small breasts, for whom one should imagine no one would be up in arms about being drawn without some subtle bumps in theri chest line, and yet Kubo still does not miss the detail...

So with that intentionality in mind, the fact that he then went out of his way to... I don't want to call it "cleverly"... but eh... """cleverly""" avoid drawing attention to Giselle's chest by putting her in an oversized top, and even changing its design around the sleeves, and subsequently part of her silhouette(she was slightly curvier, and her outfit was less fluffy in her early appearances?), as her "reveal" chapter got closer, becomes a noticeably meaningful choice. In particular in proximity to the "reveal."

And you know who else he seemed to have taken similar care in how he drew? Shutara Senjumaru. And granted, as i prefaced this whole post with facetiousness, not as insulation but as disclaimer, this is a ridiculous angle of approach. it's a ridiculous premise. the evidence and logic underpinning every step of it is dumb, but in spite of any of that, Shurata's silhouette jumped out and grabbed me from her very first appearance. The line from her neck/shoulder down to her waist is unlike how he's drawn any other flat chested/small breasted shinigami. And that comes in conjunction with the rest of her aesthetic:

She is dressed like something between a Geisha: high class personal entertainer, a Tayu or Oiran: a high class prostitute, or a Kabuki actor who could likely be playing a character styled after or explicitly in the role of either.

Obviously her most striking feature is the bizarre headdress, which appears to be made of kanzashi[簪]: a rather broad category of hair accessories typical of geisha and oiran.

She appears to be wearing two exaugurated pins to create the shape of a crescent moon with what look like they would be the sort of hanging elements of a bira-bira kanzashi; meaning that each of those vertical bars hanging from the underside of the moon would be free to swing back and forth from a connecting link or chain(s).

The radiating golden bars from the top I assume would be a kind of hanagushi hair comb, again with obvious exaguration given its size.

And the under hanging radiance being something like miokuri.

It also gives off super distinct vibes of an art movement that I hate that I cannot for the life of pinpoint right now... I want to say it was Spanish colonial(???) that used to specifically carve halos in this style, not as a round solid disc, but as a series of geometric rays... I hate to say that the thing I always think of is how Death Note borrowed it for its pseudo religious imagery. (although I guess the French did it too a bit during the reign of King Louis the XIV, but i always associate it with the mexican art of catholic saints, but I'm not even sure if I'm thinking of the right thing.)

In any case those are motifs or themes that we never get to see explored. boo...

Shutara is however kind of unexpectedly underdressed for a super powered clothier. Her one exterior cloak thing is as bas I can tell not anything real, even ignoring its defiance of gravity. If she were an oiran you would expect more layers, and the distinctive thing i don't know the name for that they hold in front of them and conceals their hands... She does however have the unmistakable oiran raised shoes.

And finally her makeup is a little vague but with relative consistency she's been depicted as extremely pale, which strongly suggests white makeup, typical of unfortunately all three aesthetic culprits, thus not actually narrowing the reference down at all.

Taken then with her theme of clothes and costuming in proximity of theater, the power of clothes/costume and thus presentation and roleplay, Kubo's super distasteful conflation of Giselle's transgender identity as some kind of "disguise" or "deception," kabuki using onnagata --male actors specifically trained in female role performance and upheld and even coveted at times throughout history as an apex of femininity, even above and beyond that of ciswomen-- the fact that Senjumaru is just straight up a masculine name, etc...

Like i said in the other post about all this, which i'm reluctant to even link back to, without any further elaboration it's impossible to say what this actually means for shutara as a character, and any inworld logic that applies. I don't think she is supposed to be a literal actress, like she has some personal history of professional theater training and performance.

That feels like it should be obvious. But understand that while all of this was a pain in the ass to try and lay out explicitly, it's something that, knowing all these disparate factoids already, I didn't actually have to think about at all when I first saw Shutara. I just clocked her as a queer woman immediately. It felt super obvious.

But now for my due diligence.(i actually totally thought there woudl be more of it at first...) Because as confident as I am in my theory, even I can recognize that it is not without holes. For one, entirely outside this pattern is Liltotto, who is actually very consistently drawn without the otherwise ubiquitous indication of AFAB breasts I point out otherwise. And she is certainly given no particular trans coding the way I associate with Gigi and Shutara.

i was going somewhere with this and i forgot... i think i though there dbe a bigger string of tangents to go off and when there werent my brain just kinda fizzled out without drawing a conclusion...

[conorjameson]

The fugitive

The Goshawk can cast a spell on you. I know this because it happened to me, and to some others I’ve met. Something in the penetrating gaze of the bird stays with you. It is a kind of hypnosis, reinforced with each rare encounter.

I can trace my love affair with the Goshawk to a picture in a book. Or rather, on a book. Goshawks made the cover of the first book on birds of prey that I saw, as a young child, in the early 1970s. It was a pair at the nest, all red-eyed rapaciousness, female brooding a downy chick, male grasping a song thrush. I was smitten. I loved everything about this bird, even the drama in the name –Goshawk. That glare.

Back then, Goshawks were in the first stages of reclaiming our remoter forests. Bar the odd escaped pair here and there, Goshawks had been effectively absent as breeding birds from the UK since the early 1880s.

Growing up in Scotland, I heard about these fugitive goshawks, escaped and unofficially released birds, apparently gaining a toehold. In my forest rovings, I always had half an eye – and ear - open for Gos, and once or twice even fancied I might have glimpsed one. But of course I couldn’t be sure. Like anyone else, through those years I was witnessing with pleasure the return of the Sparrowhawk, Peregrine and Buzzard. Somehow the Goshawk lagged far behind, out of sight, out of mind. No one, and few books, seemed to have much to say about the mysterious Gos.

I found one man who did: T H White. The author of The Sword in the Stone, White was also moonstruck by this bird. The Goshawk is regarded as a classic of its kind. I unearthed it in an antique bookshop some years ago. The prose is dense, intense, and a revelation. Here was a man who could articulate his fascination with this enigmatic bird. But he was also fixated with mastering it. I had no such aspiration, although I appreciated the insight on its character provided by White’s up-close and personal involvement with this often wretched, furious, bating hawk.

White was writing in the 1930s, in a Gos-free Britain. He had walked away from his job as an English teacher at a private school. He rented a keeper’s cottage and attempted to master the bird using the medieval method by which he was also intrigued. He sought with his Goshawk ‘to revert to a feral state’. Predictably, perhaps, the hawk beat him to it.

It was clear. Goshawks are wilder than most birds, you might say; highly strung, high maintenance, compulsive. Falconers I meet now tell me they can’t or won’t keep the species. They never show them at public demonstrations. Goshawks have a tendency to mania, to buggering off, to dropping dead. Even captive Goshawks, it seems, are hard to see.

But not everyone loves the Goshawk. And I’m not just talking about the usual suspects in the murky world of raptor persecution. There are a few birders out there who are at best ambivalent about the species. You may know some.

It is accepted wisdom that our UK Goshawk population today originates from absconded birds, and deliberate releases. Although Goshawks from the continent do move through these islands on passage, this appears not to happen in significant numbers, and they are believed strongly tied to home. The Goshawk is a fully protected species here. But even so, to some conservation-minded people it has only a faintly legitimate status, as though it has yet to be universally accepted. I know one birder who regards Goshawks with the same disdain he does Canada Geese.

In addition to being, in some eyes, ‘semi-feral’, the Goshawk’s rapaciousness can also lose it friends. It can alienate not just game-rearers, but enthusiasts for other bird species. The Goshawk tends not to like having other raptors, and corvids, around when it is breeding. It can also kill and eat anything up to the size of a Capercaillie. We don’t have many of those to spare, in the end.

It is also a difficult bird to get to know, to watch and enjoy. It has not been championed in the way enjoyed by our other renascent raptors – the eagles, kites, harriers, ospreys and falcons. It has almost as little visible presence as a nocturnal predatory mammal. It is, in the end, hard to sell what we cannot see.

The Goshawk has always been greatly valued as a falconer’s – or more properly an austringer’s – bird. The French call it the ‘cuisinier’. It may lack a Falcon’s exhibitionism in the sky, but for sheer muscularity, dexterity, focus and lethalness in a short chase, for game as large as adult hares, the Goshawk was the connoisseur’s choice. It was the choice of Attila the Hun, King John, Frederick the Great, and not just of the yeoman, as is popularly held. Accipiter gentilis was long beloved of falconers across Europe and Asia. In repose, it oozes nobility, gravitas, courage.

But they are difficult to captive breed. A male Goshawk knows better than to be around his much larger mate when she is hungry, or irritable. She makes a fickle cellmate. For centuries, captive Goshawks were traded across Europe, set free to breed, and the young harvested from tree nests. These birds were hard currency. When land was sold, rights to Hawk nests might be negotiated – or not – separately. Our Goshawk population today may have mixed Finnish, German and Czech origin, but so too do Spain’s smaller, darker wild Goshawks today produce genetic throw-backs to these larger, paler northern races.

Some may regret the somewhat ad hoc provenance of our Goshawks today, and the haphazard nature of their re-establishment, but this reflects the wider history of our relationship with the species. It is not, for me, a reason to devalue the bird. If anything, the opposite is true.

Given this trade, movement and ‘farming’ of Goshawks since Saxon times, there are those who have queried whether we can be sure it was originally a native UK species. Max Nicholson was one: ‘The Goshawk, often counted among the lost, was probably never indigenous,’ he wrote in 1926. ‘But’ he noted, ‘the evidence is bewildering’.

More recently, scenting a possible loophole in wildlife law to exploit, some game-rearing interests have challenged the Goshawk’s status. So can we be sure it was here without our help? Quite apart from the free-range ‘harvesting’ of Accipiter gentilis, early written records are unreliable because of possible confusion with the Peregrine, in particular.

Happily, the recently published History of British Birds by Yalden and Albarella presents conclusive evidence on the matter. There are scattered bone deposit records of Goshawk since the post-glacial, even more than for Peregrine. It was here, ok. The authors estimate a UK population of Goshawks in the ‘pristine Mesolithic forests’ of pre-human Britain touching 14,000 pairs. They base this on extrapolations from Bialowiecza Forest in Poland, Europe’s largest intact fragment of this ancient woodland.

Even without this hard evidence, it would be hard to conceive of the Goshawk absent from our wildwood. My instinct is it was probably pre-eminent. In the absence of the Eagle Owl, the Goshawk must have enjoyed alpha predator status among the oaks, limes and pines that cloaked mainland Britain. It’s an interesting thought that this forgotten, fugitive, poorly understood and occasionally resented species might once have lorded it over our wildwood landscape.

The Goshawk re-cast its spell on me two years ago. I found one in Yorkshire. I came face to face with the most vivid specimen: a first-year female, all subtle saffron tints and chocolaty arrowheads, talons clamped on a prone magpie, glaring at me as I teetered on a ladder. I was in a junk shop. She was in a glass case. Stuffed. As she fixed me with that glare, she fixated me with these questions about what we did to her kind, and to ourselves in the process. 

The Goshawk was the first of the raptors we wiped out in Britain. We usually call this persecution, but looking at this bird in the case, it occurred to me that admirers played their part in the extermination process. We killed beautiful things the better to look at them. I’m not judgmental about the trophy hunters of the killing age. Any of us might have done the same thing, in their position.

Our last Goshawks are said to have bred near MacBeth’s Birnam Wood, Perthshire, in 1883. But there is another troubling question. Can we be sure they were completely extirpated? Given the secretiveness of the species, it seems feasible that some might have held on, in a quiet corner somewhere.

I spent a few weeks in spring 2010 with Goshawk experts in the remoter forests of Britain where Goshawks survive today. Mick Marquiss, whose study area covers north-east Scotland, is in no doubt that the Goshawk was exterminated by the end of the 19th century.

‘I used to think that maybe they had held on,’ he told me. ‘But I don’t believe that now.’

There is one clinching reason, for Mick: ‘They may be hard to see, but they are very easy to trap,’ he says.

Writings by the Victorian naturalist W H Hudson leave us a vivid idea of what Goshawks were up against in the period.

‘I heard of another case at Fonthill Abbey (Wiltshire). Nobody could say what this wandering hawk was – it was very big, blue above with a white breast barred with black – a ‘tarrable’, fierce-looking bird with fierce, yellow eyes. All the gamekeepers and several other men with guns were in hot pursuit of it for several days, until someone fatally wounded it, but it could not be found where it was supposed to have fallen. A fortnight later its carcass was discovered by an old shepherd, who told me the story. It was not in a fit state to be preserved, but he described it to me, and I have no doubt that it was a goshawk.’

You can only imagine how demoralised Hudson and others like him felt in that era, when a wandering Goshawk would face such overwhelming odds. A century further on, he might be minded to ask if the Goshawks are back. We could tell him the apparently encouraging news that the UK Goshawk population can now be estimated at around 400 pairs, thanks to data compiled by the Rare Breeding Birds Panel, from information provided in large part by the Raptor Study Groups. But he might be slightly puzzled that it hasn’t changed much since the Atlas of 20 years ago. It is quite likely, we could suggest, that there are more Goshawks out there than this, but probably not many more. ‘Although they are cryptic what’s clear from our work is that there’s no large population sitting there undiscovered,‘ say the experts (Rutz et al).

Until recently, we might have concluded that the lack of large-scale coniferous forest was the limiting factor for Goshawks in Britain. But just across the North Sea in the Netherlands, for example, Goshawks have reclaimed the landscape, from lowland farmland to urban centres, exploiting the corvids, pigeons, thrushes, gulls, rabbits and rats that proliferate across these habitats.

‘Goshawks in The Netherlands tell a complicated story,’ says Rob Bijlsma, who has studied them there for many years. ‘A story of huge successes and spread into densely populated areas, followed by demise more recently.’

It seems reasonable to wonder why our Goshawks haven’t done something similar. Mick Marquiss and fellow Raptor Study Group researchers are in no doubt that illegal killing is the main reason.

’Goshawks, for all their prowess as hunters, cannot resist an apparently free meal,’ he says. ‘Their foraging areas overlap, and they wander a lot outside the breeding season. One trap with a live crow or pigeon as bait can draw in Goshawks from a wide area, and act as the ‘plug-hole’ down which a local population can vanish. Easy to catch, and easy to hide: so proving the true scale of this crime has been difficult – at least up to now.‘

Advances in technology and tracking are helping us to understand the Goshawk better, and work is now being done to get a better handle on the Goshawk’s situation in the UK.

My search for this bird has left me convinced that there could be a Goshawk-shaped hole in our world. This incredible animal remains AWOL in much of our landscape — spinneys, parks, towns, even cities — and largely absent from our consciousness. The Goshawk isn’t out of the woods yet, but it might be if we’d let it. The shackles have not yet been broken. And nor, for me, has the Goshawk’s lingering spell.

Conor Jameson

This article was first published in Birdwatch magazine.

Photo of a male Goshawk taken in the Scottish borders by Chas Moonie. 

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