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Though, if I’m going to be honest, I am a little bothered people think girls who dress boyish aren’t girls? And it takes them dressing and looking very feminine to mean they want to be a girl?

Basically if Dororo was a girl who liked to dress like a boy, by the majority opinion on Tumblr they would just keep calling Dororo a boy. It took Dororo dressing girlly to confirm that she is a girl for them.

That is such a narrow minded view of what it means to be a girl. Do tomboys no longer exist?

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Dororo ending

Welp, I called it. Dororo being a girl was not a shock at all considering my past post about it. I didn’t expect it to be confirmed so blatantly though, since the anime relies on subtlety. I expected it to be left where it is and people who can’t read subtext or nuance would run with it forever. :/ But I’m glad this ends the toxic discourse once and for all.

I actually expected the separation and time skip ending too though, so I’m surprised I got that right too. Hyak didn’t kill Tahou by his own hands, that was a fitting touch. Thanks so much Mappa, the ending and deaths were so fitting. (Yes, even the “unneeded” deaths, but none of them felt unneccesary narrative wise.) I couldn’t have thought of a better ending. I’ll remember this anime for a long time to come.

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Dororo is a girl (with evidence)

I didn’t really want to step foot into this terrible debate on Tumblr, but this issue has been eating away at me for so long, because I felt guilty for not saying anything. I disliked people disregarding creator intent and pushing Western POVs on Asian media, so I eventually couldn’t stay quiet anymore.

Honestly, Tumblr is pretty much the only popular site that vehemently thinks Dororo was written as a trans boy, and had spread the toxicity to the Wiki. The echo chamber of Tumblr is getting out of hand with misinformation. Sometimes I would even hear people saying that Dororo uses male pronouns which they heard from Tumblr, but there is no male/female pronoun that you use to refer to yourself in Japanese, only pronouns genders more commonly use. When the show first started I checked the wikis and they all said Dororo was a girl (I got spoiled by this), but after the “discourse” happened here I noticed the wikis were all changed into Dororo being trans. People really wanted to control the narrative.

As well, I know there are others that agree with me but are afraid to use “she”, or think of Dororo as a girl out of fear of being bullied off the site. So I’ll say it for you. Dororo was intended to be a girl most likely by Tezuka, and definitely by Mappa.

Part 1) THE MANGA (1967)

First of all, we have to acknowledge that this series is Japanese. The Eurocentrism is very strong in the Dororo Tumblr debate. There is a common trope in Japanese series of women living as men, or being raised as men. Especially in that time period. I think anyone who has read a lot of manga will be familiar with this trope. Rose of Versailles is a good example of an old one.

Tezuka is also very fond of this trope, but he will always insist that in the end that no matter how masculine the female character is, the characters “want to live femininely” or whatnot. There’s a semi misogynistic undercurrent that in the end, a girl should be girlly. This is a series from the 1960s, so while disappointing it’s not surprising.

In the Dororo manga, this is prominent from Hyakkimaru’s commentary. While from a Western modern POV he’s kinda being a dick, in 1960s Japan Tezuka was writing him as the hero and voice of reason to the childish Dororo.

Similarly, Hyakkimaru’s comment “Could it be you don’t really know yourself?” on Dororo being raised as a boy was Tezuka giving an explanation for why Dororo was raised the way that she was. The idea was that Dororo was raised by her parents as a boy so she would become tough during such cruel times. However, hiding the truth from their daughter caused Dororo to not understand her actual gender.

However, due to the manga being cut short, these plot points weren’t truly handled well or brought to a close. Judging by how he wrote other gender bender stories like Princess Knight, most likely Dororo would have “grown up” and lived as a girl like Hyakkimaru was saying. This of course is pure speculation, but these tropes are usually handled in this manner in anime. The PS2 “Blood Will Tell” Dororo (officially by Tezuka Productions) ended the series in this way.

Part 2) THE ANIME (2019)

The anime wrote Dororo much more mature and thoughtful than the manga, and is the main series I wanted to talk about regarding this. Dororo in the anime, unlike the manga, is actually aware of being a girl.

The reason it’s important in this context, is because the 2019 Dororo is not only about demons and fighting, but also about human suffering during the warring periods. And very notably, the difficulties of women in the past.

This is highlighted through the contrast of several prominent women in the series. The most notable is Mio and Dororo’s mother. They are women put into similar circumstances, that had to find ways to survive on their own. Dororo’s mother was too proud to go into prostitution and ended up starving as a result. Mio was able to survive because she put aside her pride.

Other women include Hyakkimaru’s mother and Mutsu. Hyakki’s mother was the lords wife who had to listen to his orders, even though she did not agree with them. She is also sometimes “put into her place” by misogynistic phases like “What do women know about politics?” by her husband. Mutsu on the other hand, is in a similar situation as Dororo. To serve as Tahomaru’s retainer, she had to dress and live as a male. The historical context makes the reason obvious, women were simply not taken seriously in those times. It doesn’t need to be spelled out to be understood.

Mappa was purposely highlighting that scene between Mio and Dororo talking about her job, because Dororo understood the choices that women had to make to survive. The added layer to that scene was Dororo understanding that if she had lived as a lone girl, she would also be faced with the same choices that her mother, as well as Mio were. This was one of the implicit themes in the scene between Dororo and Mio, and is also why Dororo was quick to understand Mio’s situation and not pass judgement.

This is why it bothered me that this entire narrative of women’s hardships that centered around Dororo hiding her gender was being erased by the 2019 Dororo fandom.

But hard evidence always speaks louder, so I will show official tweets by Mappa just to dispel any doubts.

In the first screenshot they explicitly say “Dororo is actually a girl.” In the second, “with the map on her back, how will she use it for the battles to come” they use 彼女 “kanojo” to refer to Dororo, which is the same as “she” Or referring to someone as a girl. I already knew about this word in Japanese but double checked these translations with my friend who could read Japanese and she confirmed this.

The tweets explicitly refer to Dororo as a female, they did not have to add “kanojo” to refer to her and use ways around it, but they did. It is purposeful. This is from official twitter accounts, even retweeted by the official Dororo anime twitter, so there is no mistake.

CLOSING STATEMENTS

I’ve never had a problem with people having headcanons in ways that they found meaningful, but I had a problem with the way the word “transphobic” was being weaponized to quash opposing views, the toxicity, and the misinformation being spread about one of my favorite anime series. Mappa truly was trying to create something artistic with the new anime, full of symbolism and subtlety. The out of context black and white views of this series did not do it justice.

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Thanks, that’s where I belong.

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My friend and I started a new FE:A file at a cafe, and were thinking up trolly names. Chrom loves his booty. But his booty loves danger more.

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ARE YOU TRYING TO MAKE ME CRY MORRIGAN???? ARE YOU?????

CAUSE YOU ALMOST DID.

Seriously, she was my favorite character in Origins, and she felt like a real female friend. She’s fiercely intelligent, logical, powerful, and a bit socially inept. DO YOU KNOW HOW RARE IT IS TO FIND FEMALES LIKE THAT THESE DAYS IN MEDIA?! That’s usually a male character’s role.

Thank you Gaider for writing her. 

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Varric's stories must be A+++.

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O GOD WHAT IS THIS

WHERE HAVE I BEEN SENT TO

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This is the best room greeting of All Time. Most fitting for Alpaca Land.

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At least he's honest.

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Ahh yes... the good ol days and the good ol rosters.

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League community in a nutshell.

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From a few years ago...

Riot had severe lag issues where screens would constantly freeze and champs would float around the screen... so my team gave up after a while and just drew stuff with wards at base............

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Mass dumping misc. jewels into room to feel baller.

The legendary Eyes of the Falmer is but a nice bedside decoration in a fruit bowl now.

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Yes, this lady dressed in full assassination gear BUT WITH A CHEF HAT is totally the Gourmet. Totally not here to assassinate your king, or anything.