good mornings throughout the travel
[ID: Two comics of Vash and Wolfwood from Trigun Maximum. The second is underneath the read more.
The first is in four panels and follows Vash and Wolfwood through hotel rooms. First, Vash and Wolfwood exit adjacent rooms, and Wolfwood has sparkles floating around him as he exclaims, “Rise and shine! Ready to go?” Vash frowns, displeased, and says, Urk— Good morning to you too.”
Next, they’re in a room with two beds. Wolfwood is awake and fully dressed. He’s sitting on the bed and smoking, back turned away from the viewer and he says, “Wake up already, sleepyhead.” Vash sits up with his eyes still closed and yawns before saying good morning. After that, they’re sharing a bed, and Wolfwood gets up and says, “Morning, sunshine. Time to get up.” His body shadows Vash from the sunlight. Vash is still lying down with a blanket draped over him as he mumbles good morning.
Finally, they’re embracing in bed, both shirtless. Sunlight shines on them, but their contact allows their shadows to drape over their faces. Vash smiles, kisses the top of Wolfwood’s head, and says, “Good morning, Wolfwood.” Wolfwood sleepily says, “Mph, g’morning, needle-noggin’,” snuggling into on Vash’s shoulder. End ID] ID CREDIT
TRIMAX Vol. 10 Spoilers under read more // bonus comic
[ID: The bonus comic starts with Vash asleep in bed, fully clothed with his hair half-black. Someone says “Good morning,” and Vash says, “Morning, Wolf—w...” He trails off as Livio, holding a plate of food, stares with abject shock.
Livio says, “I’m sorry.” Vash, smiling but sweating, says, “No, it’s my bad...” Livio repeats, “I’m sorry.” Vash says, “Geez, stop apologizing,” and cuts off Livio’s “I—” with a “Good morning, Livio.” Livio quietly mumbles, “... Good morning...”
Vash sits up from the couch he was sleeping on and looks down, thinking, “... That’s right. I won’t wake up to you anymore... I have to get used to that...” End ID]
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Mizu's spectacles, and the levels of her disguise
In drafting some more Blue Eye Samurai meta posts, I find myself writing out the comparisons between what Mizu can and cannot hide about herself, and how that affects how she moves through the world.
Like, I get the jokes about Mizu's glasses, if only color contacts had existed back then, etc. etc., and I think (hope) that most viewers don't take the glasses jokes seriously, as in "I don't care about the suspension of disbelief because BES is a cartoon." But I wanted to write these thoughts out anyway without burying them in a text post about something else.
I think the points I'm going to lay out here are viewed very differently by different people, so please feel free to add to this post, reply, or put your thoughts in the tags!
Not only do Mizu's glasses not actually help her that much, there's surely more to Mizu's mixed race appearance than just the color of her eyes.
In my view, this was pointed out in episode 1:
I'm willing to bet most of us were expecting young Taigen to say "blue eyes," not "ROUND eyes."
Obviously this is still about Mizu's eyes, but not even spectacles can hide their shape.
I don't think the show is obligated to point out everything about Mizu's face that isn't quite as Japanese as the people around her expect. Though the creators have said that they specifically designed Mizu - and her clothes - to read both as "white" and as "Japanese," as well as both male and female. I think there's more about Mizu's features that read as "white" than just her eyes.
This is where my own headcanons start entering the picture, but it's my impression that people can just tell that Mizu looks different, whether or not they can put a finger on exactly how.
There's the little girl who looks at Mizu and then hides on the way into Kyoto:
When there's more to your face you'd like to cover up than just your eyes, big hats are a big help!
By the way, most of these examples have to come from the first half of the season, since by the second half, either Mizu is too preoccupied with fighting henchmen, or everyone Mizu is facing knows who she is already, and she therefore has no reason to hide her mixed race identity.
It's worth mentioning that the mere fact that Mizu has to hide multiple aspects of her identity - her mixed race and her sex - results in her having to choose clothes that really, really cover her up, which doesn't win her any favors either:
(Zatoichi reference, anyone?)
If it were as easy as, for example, tying her glasses to her head and wa-lah, nobody would ever know she was half-white - then (1) Mizu would've just done that long ago, and (2) Mizu wouldn't be so on guard and on tenterhooks 100% of the time the way she's depicted in the show, even when her glasses are on.
Her spectacles sure don't help her in the brothel, which is full of observant women who are trying to seduce her, meaning they get good long looks at her:
Mizu never takes her glasses off, but they still send a woman to her who has light eyes, thinking that must be what will interest a blue-eyed man:
No wonder Mizu gets mad after this, lol
So Mizu never takes her spectacles off in the brothel, it's dimly lit inside, and the women can still tell that she has blue eyes. I'm getting the sense that Mizu putting on her spectacles isn't a guarantee that people suddenly can't tell that she looks different.
And yet no one spots that she's female.
Mizu can hide her breasts, can wear her hair in the right style, can hide what's between her legs, can walk and talk and behave like a man - and she's been doing it for almost her entire life, to the point that not only is she very good at it, but the threat of being found out as female is deadly, but isn't presented in the show as omnipresent.
Let me explain.
She threatens Ringo for nearly saying the word "girl" out loud, because while she's constantly ostracized for being mixed race, being a woman traveling without a chaperone, carrying a sword, and disguised as a man will get her killed or flogged or arrested or some combination of these things.
But in addition, it's been drilled into her since she was a child that if she is discovered as female, the combination of her being mixed race and female will identify her as someone extremely specific, someone known to some bad people, and she will be killed:
I think of it as Mizu thinking to herself, "Being found out as mixed race means I'm treated badly. Being found out as mixed race and a woman means I'm dead."
Mizu's hair is cut as a child. But she isn't made to wear a big hat, or cover her eyes somehow, or anything like that. Because hiding her sex is a more successful endeavor than hiding her race.
Ringo finds out she's female by accident, but once Mizu accepts the fact that he won't rat her out, she relaxes pretty early on in the season. Because the threat of being found out as female is mitigated pretty much 99.9%, since Mizu has gotten so good at being a man. And also, because most of the time, people see what they want to see. Even if Mizu's face makes her stand out as "not 100% Japanese," no one in the world of BES looks at Mizu's clothes, her bearing, her sword, hears her voice, and will ever in a million years conclude that she is a woman, because expectations around gender roles in the Edo period were so rigid and so widely enforced.
One detail that proved this to me is after the Four Fangs fight:
Ringo takes off Mizu's clothes so he can stitch her up, then leaves her clothes off even after he's done. He doesn't even throw her cloak over her as a blanket or anything. There's a little a straw (pallet?) as a divider there on the left, but anyone could just peek around it and see Mizu and her chest bindings. (I think it's mostly there as a windbreaker.)
And Taigen is right there, but he doesn't give a shit:
Opinions probably vary hugely on this, but my impression is that because the show doesn't make any kind of deal about Taigen being in the room with Mizu here, my guess is that Mizu isn't in any danger of Taigen thinking she's female. Even when I watched the show for the first time, I assumed that Taigen had seen Mizu out of her clothes here, and that he thought nothing of it.
Eat your heart out, Li Shang (Mulan 1998). I actually do think that this scene is a direct and purposeful side-eye to that movie, lol
There's obviously some nuance to how "severe" being mixed race is compared to how "severe" being a woman is for Mizu:
After all, Swordfather can't bear to listen to Mizu confess to being a woman.
So a Japanese man can go wherever he wants, whenever he wants in BES. A Japanese woman has limited options: marriage, religion, or a brothel. A mixed-race man is an eyesore in this story. A mixed-race woman is a death sentence.
May as well eliminate the female aspect, and do what you can about the mixed-race aspect. Because that's just realistic.
Meaning Mizu can avoid the strictures Edo society places on women. But she can't avoid the repercussions that come with being mixed race. And I truly don't think that it's just because "there's no brown contacts yet."
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I’m still bothered by the fact Feyre left Lucien filthy and in the clothes he’d been in for a week when she brought him back to the Night Court.
I get it—you’re glad to be home and happy to see Rhys. So go give him a big, passionate hug and kiss (completely acceptable given the circumstances), tell him to start a bath for you, and MAKE SURE YOUR GUEST IS COMFORTABLE AND SITUATED FIRST. You don’t have to give him a full tour of the city and introduce him to everyone yet: just show him to the bath, make sure he has fresh clothing, and a room for now so he can get clean and decompress a little. Let him know he can get food from the kitchen or whatever he needs. If he’s going to end up staying somewhere else, at least make him comfortable for now.
You can do all of the above while still being emotional about being reunited with your love.
Then go spend however long “catching up” with Rhys.
At least Lucien could be soaking in a hot bath of his own and have a fresh set of clothes to change into while y’all are making up for that time apart. He could grab a snack and get settled into his room or somewhere.
I love Feyre. I really do, but that scene had me cringing. I'd make a joke about her being raised in a barn, but people raised in a barn would've immediately made sure he was taken care of before tending to their own business.
I'd extend the same expectation to Rhys even if he wasn't happy with/suspicious of Lucien, but I do feel that it should've been Feyre at least starting that process. I know she's tired. I know she's been through it too, but she's still the bridge between him and the Night Court at that point.
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I'm having incoherent thoughts about clone danny again from the clone/clone^2 au (when am I not?) but more specifically I'm thinking about his reaction to finding out he's a clone. The standalone clone au digs into that a little more than clone^2, which is more focused on Danny and Damian's relationship. But neither (so far) really get into Danny's issues about finding out he's a clone after 15 years of thinking he wasn't.
Because he resents his parents for not telling him for so long. He resents the way he found out; through a trivial school project rather than a sit-down talk. He resents the fact that, apparently, they had meant to tell him sooner. But forgot. He resents the fact that they never told him because finding out feels like something was stolen from him when it had the chance to not be.
Danny Fenton, just fifteen, cloned not even half a year ago, knows what that personal violation of autonomy feels like. He knows what it's like to be cloned and while he loves Ellie, he does, she's his sister, and in this au his twin. But he is still left with that feeling of unsafety after realizing he'd been cloned. Being cloned is violating. The onset realization that it's so easy to get DNA without the other party noticing, and that what was stopping someone from trying to clone him again?
Followed only after with the rest of the inexplainable mix of feelings of being cloned, the rest of that inner conflict and panic that's an ugly mocktail of emotions that range from horror to fear. Trying to imagine what it's like to be cloned from the cloned party, and I imagine that it leaves you with the feeling of needing to crawl out of your own skin with discomfort.
And then he gets put on the other side of it. Danny Fenton, only fifteen, was cloned not even half a year ago, finding out he is a clone. And reactions, I imagine, can vary from person to person. But to him, it feels like something got stolen from him, like someone took a hole puncher and stuck it right into his chest and stole a chunk of himself from him.
It changes nothing about him and yet it changes everything. It's a betrayal on it's own to just find out he was a clone and they didn't tell him for fifteen years -- it shouldn't mean anything, because he's still Danny, and yet it means everything. It's him, it's him, it's about him. It's his personhood. It's about the fact that a load-bearing rock in his identity just crumbled beneath his feet and now there's a rockslide.
Because then he finds out that they used the wrong DNA. Its like pouring salt in an open wound. He's not even related to his parents or his sister, when for years he thought he was. It's the fact that pieces of his identity that he's been so secure in for so long just got ripped away from him in an instant. Then they tell him -- only through his own horrified prompting -- that the person whose DNA they used -- Bruce Wayne -- didn't even know he existed. That they accidentally used the wrong DNA, then didn't tell the person whose DNA they used.
The betrayal of being lied to for years turns really quickly into horror at his own existence. Something very similar to the horror he felt at being cloned and the skin-crawling discomfort that made him feel like his own skin wasn't really his. And then its not. It's actually not. Nothing but his own name feels like it belongs to him anymore -- not his hair, not his eyes, not his heart or his lungs, nothing feels like his anymore and he didn't know what that felt like until it was gone.
It's a question of Nature Vs. Nurture -- where does the line of "nature" begin and where does the line of "nurture" end? What of him is actually his? What of him is Bruce Wayne's? It's not logical, it's not supposed to be. It's a load-bearing wall on the house of his identity being destroyed and now everything else is caving down in on him. What belongs to Danny, what belongs to Bruce Wayne?
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