#everything about mizu is so deeply upsetting

[earl-of-221b]

I can’t explain what blue eye samurai makes me feel…….its a typical revenge story, a man sets out on his hero’s journey to kill the four men who have wronged him. A lone ronin, wide brimmed hat and sword in hand, roaming Edo Japan on his vendetta. But he’s not a man. He’s a woman. And how has he been wronged? What’s she getting revenge on?

On the fact that she exists. She wants revenge on the four white men that could possibly have conceived her. Who got her Japanese mother pregnant with a blue-eyed child. And not just any blue-eyed child, but a girl child. How is she possibly supposed to live in the world like that? For the wrong of being conceived, for the wrong of being born, for the wrong of being birthed into a world that will never love or accept her, she will kill her father.

I don’t know what level of convoluted self hate that is. Is she a child of rape? Or a child of a whore? Halfway through I realise what she told herself at the start couldn’t possibly be true - it’s not really for her mother. Her mother wasn’t the root of her vendetta, she wasn’t really doing it for her. When she leaves that farm and leaves the chance to live a simple, legitimate life as a woman, she goes right back to hunting down the men. Those men personally wronged her.

And then there’s so much to be discussed surrounding the way she grew up, because as a boy child and a man she can afford so much more than life has dealt her. Her swordfather who took her in out of the love and care in his heart had no shame in teaching a mixed man his art. The face of a ‘demon’ is fine. But not the identity of a woman. Shh. Don’t say it. Don’t confess. He knows and doesn’t want to hear it.

And because she’s lived that way her entire life for safety and security, she’s so completely alienated from being a woman, perhaps she really is he. But not really by choice. Or is it? The thing she does best is the art of killing, the art of men. Gender is a prison and gender is a performance and she has to choose which to perform. The times cannot reconcile hatred and violence with a woman. So she lives as a man.

So she can get revenge on her father, for revenge on herself.